I've used Untappd for years to log the beers I drink. It works. It also drives me a little crazy every time I open it.
Between the ads wedged into my feed, the check-in pressure that makes logging a beer feel like a social performance, and an interface that's accumulated more features than I've ever asked for, opening the app to do one simple thing — "I liked this beer, I want to remember it" — started to feel like more work than it should be.
So a few weeks ago, I decided to build my own.
The idea: Letterboxd, but for beer
If you haven't used Letterboxd, it's a film-logging app that took a genre Untappd basically also occupies — "social logging app for a hobby" — and did it with a fraction of the clutter. Clean, fast, personal-journal-first, social-second. That's the model I wanted for beer.
I called it HopLog. The pitch, in one sentence: log what you drink, remember what you liked, discover something new — without ads, without check-in pressure, without a hundred features you'll never touch.
Building it like an actual product, not just a weekend hack
I didn't want to just start writing code and see what happened. Before a single line was written, I worked through the process a real product team would use:
A product requirements doc — what's actually in scope for a first version, and just as importantly, what's not
User personas — who is this actually for? (Turns out: the casual drinker who wants a nice photo journal, the homebrewer who wants precise tasting notes, and the traveler hunting for good local breweries — three genuinely different people with different needs)
User stories, wireframes, a database schema, an API design, and a milestone-by-milestone roadmap
Only after all of that did I start building — six milestones, one at a time, each one tested and verified before moving to the next: authentication, a real beer/brewery database, the actual tasting-logging flow, profiles with stats and badges, a social layer with feeds and follows, and finally search polish plus the unglamorous-but-necessary stuff like rate limiting and error monitoring.
The look matters more than I expected
One thing I was deliberate about: HopLog does not look like a generic app template. It has its own identity — I think of it as "taproom chalkboard": a warm, dim palette (deep malt-brown, not flat black), an amber accent that's meant to evoke light through a glass of beer, a serif display font that feels a little hand-lettered, paired with clean, legible body text.
It sounds like a small thing. But part of what makes Untappd feel tiring to me is that it doesn't feel like anything anymore — it feels like software. I wanted HopLog to feel like a place, the way a well-lit bar at night feels like a place.
The honest hard part
I'll be straightforward about the thing that actually worries me: data. Untappd's real advantage isn't its interface — it's fifteen-plus years of crowdsourced beers, breweries, and reviews. That's an enormous head start that good design alone doesn't overcome. Right now HopLog's database is small, seeded from public brewery data plus whatever people add themselves.
So I'm not pretending this is going to dethrone Untappd. What I do think is realistic: a smaller, genuinely devoted niche — people who specifically want something calmer and cleaner, the same way some people specifically prefer Letterboxd's smaller community over IMDb's.
Try it
HopLog is live at hoplog-web.vercel.app — the link goes straight to a real landing page, not a login wall, so you can see what it's about before deciding to sign up. It's free, it's ad-free, and it always will be for the core logging experience — no check-in bloat, no algorithm feed you didn't ask for, just a clean place to remember what you drank and whether you liked it.
If you try it and something's missing or annoying, I'd genuinely like to hear about it — this is very much a living, early project, built by one person who just wanted a better version of an app he already used every week.
