rDev on beer review page differs greatly from beer page

One is the rDev with respect to Recently Reviewed beers, the other is the rDev with respect to the reviews of that particular beer.

 

You've got most of it I think.

My understanding currently is that on the beer's page the rDev refers to the Deviation relative to the mean of all scores for that beer.

On the new Reviews pages the rDev refers to the Deviation of the score relative to the mean of all those recently related beers, regardless of which ones they are. If the general beers entered on that page have lots of high scores then the rDev associated with 1 will be larger than if not.

Effectively rDev tells you something about how folks in general are rating the newly rated beers. It actually probably should be larger for average beers since lots of people avoid average beer and seek out good ones. So the Mean of ratings on the Reviews pages can easily give a bigger rDev.

If you look at lots of indiviudal beers which vary in their Mean rating, a soore of 1 will have a larger rDev relative to something like Heady than it will to something like Bud Light.