You probably use it every day and may even spend more time with it than your other half but how well do you really know the Internet?

Sure it’s an amazing resource if you missed the last episode of Minuten, want to get to the bottom of Lady Gaga’s sexuality (but not her bottom) or if you, for some strange and probably medicinally treatable reason want to see what’s going on right this second in the Latvian capital of Riga.

But as interesting as all this is can the Internet help you make better decisions when it comes to choosing your beers? Does the World Wide Web make you a better beer drinker?

I’ve scoured the net looking for the top five websites that I believe can help you on your way to becoming a beer expert:

Ratebeer.com –The online beer rating community is divided into two clear camps. You’re either a RB or a BA – and the two rarely mix! RBs – Ratebeerians – use ratebeer.com as an online journal of their beer drinking adventures, recording the look, smell, taste, palate and overall impression of each and every beer they try. There are currently over 2.5 million ratings contained on the site.

Rating beers can become a highly addictive pastime, leading to erratic behaviour such as buying disgustingly cheap canned lager just so you can score another rating or spending your life savings travelling to far away places to sample rare beers (I am talking from personal experience here).

It’s also a great place to meet other beer fans with lively forums covering every topic imaginable from tips on new beers, new brewery start-ups to beery events happening near you.

You don’t have to be a beer geek to open up a free basic account there but you’ll probably be a geek after using it a few times, so be warned!

BeerAdvocate.com – This is the ‘other’ rating community run by beery brothers Todd and Jason Alström (Swedish descendants?) out of Boston in the USA. Our very own Swedish blogger Magnus Bark from Ofiltrerat is the BA’s ‘BeerFly’ Guide for Scandinavia and ensures the beers coming from this region are registered into the site’s database.

BA uses a slightly different rating methodology than RB and it’s really a question of personal preference as to which one works best. In my book RB has a stronger European influence in its overall character, forums and ratings and therefore edges it for me.

Systembevakningsagenten – this is an amazing resource if you want to track down a particular bottle of beer at the Swedish alcohol monopoly. Just search by name (or a number of other search variables) and you’ll get an instant snapshot of how many bottles of your beer are left on the shelves throughout the country and see just how fast they are being sold out.

Using data supplied by the Systembolaget this website can be the difference between skipping or sipping the latest beers releases.

FatKoll.se – the team behind Systembevakningsagenten have done it again – this time with draft beer. Want to know what’s on tap this evening at your local pub? Chances are you’ll find out here thanks to users ‘pinging’ the beers they see being sold while out in the pubs to the site, updating it in real-time. You can also search by beer brand name and brewery. It could quickly grow to become your best drinking buddy!

BeerSweden.com – Hang on, surely it’s cheating putting your own site in the top 5 list? Well yes, I suppose it is a little egotistical but this blog, along with our Facebook page really is one of the most regularly updated websites featuring original content about beer in Sweden.

A more-than honourable mention should go to Allt Om Öl, a beer blog portal that gathers the newsfeeds from some of the country’s top beer bloggers and puts them into one easy-to-navigate site. It also has ‘sister’ sites in the US and the UK making it easy for you to keep track of the international beer scene from the comfort of your keyboard.

Use these online resources and I promise you within days you’ll be struck by a revelation of Matrix-size proportions that beer is not at all as it might at first glance seem to be.

Once upon a time when you wanted to learn about a beer or a brewery you’d go down to your local pub and ask the landlord. Now you can just go online.

The virtual bar these days is always open, with plenty of global beer brands to choose from served to you from countless websites.

Beer review sites such as Ratebeer and BeerAdvocate are your modern-day landlords, happy to provide you with some words of wisdom about which beers to try and blogs such as this one are places people can now come to for a bit of virtual bar-room chit-chat.

There are lots of breweries that understand that the Internet is where its customers now hang out. They’ve understood the importance of exciting, informative, engaging and stylishly designed websites. They’re already tweeters and enthusiastic social networkers, constantly mingling and exchanging email addresses over at community sites like Facebook and MySpace.

I’ve just come back from a virtual pub-crawl of some of the most popular Swedish breweries to see what they’re doing right now to attract their ‘virtual share of throat’ . What I discovered is giving me something of a real-life hangover.

With a few exceptions Swedish breweries seem to be stuck in the dark ages (that’s the 90s in ‘Internet time’) when it comes to their websites and online activity. You only have to compare them with craft brewers from the US – who discovered the power and reach of Twitter and other online communities years ago – to see what I mean.

Although the US leads the way in terms of Internet marketing of beer brands they are by no means alone. BrewDog, a whacky microbrewery from Scotland realised the importance of winning supporters for its extreme beers from the get-go and is a text-book example of how to harness the power of the Net. The brewery’s edgey website/blog/viral activity/online stunts have unquestionably been a major factor behind its explosive growth since it was founded just two years ago.

Clever craft breweries can punch well above their weight if they know how to leverage the internet. It’s never been more important to put your beer online and as bloggers and beer fans we need to do our part to encourage our favourite brewers to go cyber. Therefore here’s my list of the best Swedish brewery websites and most active online beer marketers of 2009:

BEST OVERALL WEBSITE

My current personal nomination is Åbro, which not only looks great but is packed with useful information about brewing and beer facts).

MOST ACTIVE ONLINE BREWERY

My current personal nomination is Sigtuna, whose Head Brewer keeps Facebook fans up-to-date with his choice of hard rock music while he’s mashing in. (They MUST do something about their website though!)

BEST USE OF NEW MEDIA

(this category recognises the use of the internet and other ‘new’ mediums such as mobile phone applications to reach the beer drinking public)

My current nomination is www.norrlandsguld.nu. This brand site is bulging with cool apps and clever ways to interact with the brand and other NG drinkers.

It would be great to get your feedback and personal nominations so we can recognise the efforts of the category winners and more importantly encourage the other breweries who may be virtually lagging behind to update to beer drinking version 2.009.