Sacramento’s Alaro brewery sees schism between critical success and Untappd scores

Ray Ballestero makes good beer.

Everybody says so. Ballestero, who owns Sacramento’s Alaro brewery, won a coveted gold medal at the 2018 Great American Beer Festival. Alaro’s The Castillo won the English IPA category, making the brewery the youngest in history to win gold at the GABF.

The Castillo also cruised to gold at the California State Fair’s competition for commercial breweries. And last month Alaro took medals in five categories at the El Dorado County Commercial Beer competition.

Everybody says the beer is great — except Untappd users, who give Alaro a middling 3.69 score out of a possible 5.0. Good Untappd scores can help make a brewery’s business run red-hot; bad scores can tamp down on people willing to try something new.

Ballestero just shakes his head.

“I think it’s hype-driven,” he said. “I think our biggest thing is, a lot of people on Untappd are just chasing little badges. The more they do, the better. They go through and just bang out reviews. It’s easy to do unless something really hits you.”

Alaro’s reviews bear that theory out. The Castillo, which has a 3.72 rating, has only one review this year with words written in it. The vast majority of users simply click a point value and move on to the next one.

Not that a detailed review is necessarily a good thing.

Instagram account untappdwtf is dedicated to showing the dumbest reviews possible for beers; for instance, a one-star review notes a bottle was damaged and they never actually drank the beer. Or there’s a review of coffee-vanilla stout that says “there’s too much coffee taste.”

For Alaro, the most common complaint is the beer isn’t hoppy enough. Again, Ballestero shakes his head. He wants to make clear beers that balance the taste between hops and malt. And while IPAs are the style of choice for beer drinkers, not every style of beer is supposed to be a hop bomb.

“I see a lot of our reviews and they say “not hoppy enough, not hoppy enough, not hoppy enough. Well, a Czech pilsner shouldn’t be hoppier than what it is. If you’re judging everything against an IPA, you’re missing a lot of classic styles,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, the top five styles checked in on Untappd are American IPA, New England IPA and double IPA, pale ale and double New England IPA. Are people wrong for liking hoppy beverages? Absolutely not. But beers that are not supposed to be hoppy are often punished in the ratings. The top-rated blonde ale, which is supposed to be an easy-to-drink beer, has a 4.1 score. Top scores for IPAs reach into the 4.7s.

This is why Ballestero keeps five IPAs on draft at Alaro out of 12 tap lines. If it’s what customers want, he’s happy to provide it. But he’s not going to do anything cartoonish like fruited milkshake IPAs. He’s not going to come out with can labels featuring famous cartoon characters, which is a form of copyright infringement breweries do all the time.

Ballestero says he wants elegant beer, and labels to match. That vision has resonated in the Sacramento community. Ballestero gets emotional talking about a supporter who came in during the coronavirus pandemic, put a $100 bill on the bar and walked out.

Alaro has a steady stream of supporters. They’re not there because the brewery has won 26 awards for its beer; they just like the place.

What more could Ballestero ask for?

“(The awards are) validation from people with sophisticated beer palates, so I like that,” Ballestero said. “But you certainly want to get people in to just enjoy it.”

This story was originally published March 3, 2021 at 5:00 AM.