Santa Rosa’s Joe Tucker runs his RateBeer website like Michelin Guide

Joe Tucker is an influential guy in the craft beer industry, but it’s not because he’s a brewer, key distributor or owner of a key retail outlet.

It’s because he runs a website. Out of his Santa Rosa home, Tucker runs his RateBeer site, which provides critiques and ratings for a broad array of beers, with impressive metrics that reflect his power and reach. It attracts 1.4 million unique visitors monthly and has 400,000 registered users who opine and rate the beers they consume, from the refreshing lager to the hearty ale, with many reviews containing evocative prose.

Its Top 50 list includes colorful, educated descriptions. An imperial stout from Iowa was described as it “pours thick and motor oil black with a thin mocha head.” A Vermont saison is noted for its “hazy golden yellow pour with a bubbly white head, aroma has light funk and lemon.” Pliny the Younger, which is offered each February at Santa Rosa’s Russian River Brewing Co., was noted for its “dark copper pour … very carbonated to bring out awesome huge hoppy aromas of pine, mango, apricot and all other hoppy goodness.”

That descriptive, credible writing represents the critical distinction, Tucker contends, that makes RateBeer stand out from competitor sites such as BeerAdvocate and Untappd.

“We’re Michelin more than Yelp,” he said, referring to the authoritative French guide that provides the seal of approval for the highest-rated restaurants in the world.

Tucker’s reputation is about to grow beyond taprooms and grocery shelves; he will put on his first events next weekend, ones that could rival those thrown by veterans in the local wine and beer industry. RateBeer will hold an awards ceremony Jan. 30 at the Hyatt Vineyard Creek Hotel and Spa, bringing together 500 people for various awards, including the coveted best beer, brewery and new brewery honors.

It will coordinate with a bigger event the next day, a huge beer festival called RateBeer Best, at which more than 40 brewers from a dozen countries will be pouring their brews at a hangar near Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport. An estimated 2,500 beer lovers and aficionados are expected to attend.

“If there’s one beer festival, it’s this one,” said J.T. Fenn, owner of BeerCraft in Rohnert Park, a popular taproom that is a sponsor of the event. “It’s world class.”

The events are sandwiched between San Francisco Beer Week and the Pliny the Younger release on Feb. 5 and will contribute a significant economic boost throughout the Bay Area, even in the midst of Super Bowl 50.

But Tucker said he won’t make any money off his events. Instead he plans to donate 100 percent of the proceeds to the Ales for Autism charity. The decision fits with his low-key nature and an ethos that celebrates beer, not the money that can be made from it.

“There was no financial incentive to get into the business,” Tucker said of the early days of the craft beer business more than 20 years ago. “This idea: We are in this together. If we as influentials come together, we can defeat Goliath.”

But the craft beer industry has changed significantly in the past year as the Goliaths - Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors - lost increasing market share to the smaller upstarts, which had almost $20 billion in retail sales in 2014.

In response, Anheuser-Busch InBev has gone on a buying spree, picking up seven craft brewers. Heineken International bought a 50 percent stake in Petaluma’s Lagunitas Brewing Co. and Constellation Brands Inc. bought San Diego’s Ballast Point Brewing Co. for about $1 billion. The attendees at Tucker’s event will be under a cloud of change, with many wondering if the craft brewing industry has lost some of its soul to the corporate boardroom.

“We are so far post-victory, we have problems again,” said Tucker, who is married and has a 10-year-old son but declined to give his own age. “The old alliances are starting to fray.”

Even Tucker noted that he’s had offers for his website but has dismissed them, even if the work can be all-consuming at times. He typically sleeps about four or five hours a night. He makes his money through advertising, shelf tags for high-rated beers, and providing anonymous data to certain clients.

“They got nothing to add. They got nothing to give me that I don’t already have,” he said of potential suitors.

The site has evolved substantially from its origins, when it was established as a place to review bars with the hope that bar owners would pay for the content. The original investment was $1,500, he said.

Tucker joined the site at the turn of the century as he loved beer and wanted to polish up his programming skills. He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC San Diego.

In the late 1990s, the craft beer industry was retrenching; many brewpubs had fallen by the wayside as investors pulled out.

But that later changed, and the industry began an upswing. The website began attracting so many users that its low-budget servers began crashing. The owner offered the website to Tucker - for free.

Tucker took it over as he moved to Austin, Texas, and thought about how to create a community, receiving advice from Craig Newmark of Craigslist.

“Nobody understood our passion,” Tucker said.

The world would soon recognize it, however. In 2005, CNN ran a story on the website’s top-rated beer, Westvleteren 12, brewed by Belgian monks in a small monastery.

“The very next day there was a line kilometers long to get into the brewery,” Tucker said. “The Belgium media was all over it. It was a major turning point.”

Tucker moved to Santa Rosa in 2005 and a year later gave up his web consulting work to focus full-time on the site. To operate RateBeer, Tucker relies on 120 volunteer administrators and two coders. He uses both humans and coding to catch those looking to improperly boost ratings. He uses rules such as requiring at least 72 characters for each review and at least 10 reviews for ranking eligibility.

He also has a policy council of 12 users who assist with decisions about what types of beers are eligible for review, such as spiked root beer. The efforts provide transparency in the industry and demonstrate that RateBeer can be a trusted source as its power is through crowdsourcing.

“My whole idea for it was based on the vision that Robert Parker was just wrong,” Tucker said of the prominent wine critic whose scores could make or break a winery. “You can’t have one person’s palate stand in for the rest of the population.”

Some users have provided more than 30,000 reviews. Aaron Nielsen, a Ph.D. student in mathematics in Fort Collins, Colo., said the 10,000 reviews he has written can serve as a helpful log to remind him what he has tried and what he liked.

“I want to keep track of these because I tried so many beers out there,” Nielsen said.

Mobile users now account for about 70 percent of his traffic and he has taken steps to connect RateBeer information to about 30 other smartphone apps. Some wholesalers use the apps to check the prevalence of beers in certain markets, while others use them to verify what’s on tap at local taprooms.

In the future, Tucker is especially excited with technology that could take a genetic makeup of a user - such as those being offered by biotech firms like 23andMe - and be able to match that with the particular beers he or she may be predisposed to enjoy.

“That’s my whole approach from the very beginning,” Tucker said. “Why do people taste beer and write notes? It’s to know more about yourself.”

You can reach Staff Writer Bill Swindell at 521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @BillSwindell.