Regional rating bias

Yes and no. I find that they're harder on beers that get distributed outside their state (like SN), but less hard on local brews - in other words, maybe they're like everyone else in trying to prop up more exclusive, strictly-regional beers.

Regardless, I've noticed that interstate Cali. beers are still just as good as most Midwestern and NE IPA's. For instance, Celebration, Hoptimum and Torpedo can easily compete with the best IPA's in Vermont (have head Heady before, but not HF) and be judged better by reasonable observers. However, they're not rated as highly by Cali. folks (or anyone, for that matter) because they're widely available.

 

Vermont beer is typically (not always) overrated IMHO (and in GABF's...)

 

The term Lapulin Threshold Shift (LTS) was coined on the West Coast by a West Coast brewer to refer to what was originally an ongoing and growing West Coast phenomenon of needing more and more hops in the beer in order to be able to taste any hops at all (i.e., the tastebuds become "over worked and over fatigued" without enough variety or time to recover from being rasped by high levels of hop bitterness needed to satisfy customers). (This LTS effect has since begun to appear in a variety of places throughout the US other than the West Coast.)

One thing that’s been suggested before is that being much more likely to suffer from LTS the West Coast beer lovers aren't able to really taste anything but very high levels of hop bitterness and so anything with any kind of malt backbone showing in the tasting is likely to get downgraded since the LTS sufferer can't taste the hops in a more balanced beer. With the increasingly more frequent appearance of LTS in other regions of the country the ratings disparity you describe will soon begin to correct itself.

 

That's a point that's likely getting lost. I think you have to visit the NW in order to appreciate it.

For example, using New England as an example again, there are some damn tasty IPAs here but holy shit are most of them hard to find. I still. Good luck finding Hill Farmstead, Heady, Lunch/Dinner, Ghandi or any of the others outside of their immediate region.
With that said each year I've found more and more good beer in the Boston area when I visit. I really liked Trillium (but I had to go down to the tasting room to try it and unlike the NW you're limited to "tastes" and no pints), Night Shift, and the sours at Cambridge Brewing Co. Maine Brewing also had delicious stuff, which I had at the brewery and didn't really see in any of the bars around Boston. I'd wager the rest of the country is improving much like New England.

But still... great hoppy brews are everywhere in the NW, which is part of the OPs point.

 

Or that easterners are more likely to buy West Coast beers than westerners are to buy "under hopped" East Coast beers.

 

The 1 to 5 rating points used to have labels to guide the scoring.
Words were added to the Rating scale on 5/26/13. After debate, 6/12/13 it was updated to:
Rating Scale Words

• 1.00 - awful
• 2.00 - poor
• 3.00 - okay
• 4.00 - outstanding
• 5.00 - perfect

 

No bias really, just lucky to live in an area of the country where the beer is better than most other places....

I kid I kid....

 

Not sure this would be useful information on anything other than beers available nationally with a large number of reviews.

 

For me personnally, ok=3.5-3.75 range. Majority of beers lately I drink fall into 3.75-4.5 range with outlyers for the world class above 4.5 or just plain bad (varying degrees) below a 3.5. Then again, 90% of the time, I'm higher than the rDEV

 

The last two years have seen GABF Gold IPAs coming from Barley Browns and Breakside: both Oregon breweries.

 

From reading lots of forum posts (and being to neither location on travel to verify) Pacific NW seems somewhat similiar to Germany. Lots of fresh local beer that doesn't have large bottle distribution, more mature beer culture, high level of quality across the offerings, cultural trends to drinking in pubs, taverns, tap houses etc.

Maybe I'm wrong on that comparison, but seems to be a fair coorelation.

 

I've seen BA's on here who work for a brewery give perfect ratings to beers from that brewery

 

One of the factors is that there are just a LOT more BAs in the midwest and east coast. That is just a fact. While California is without a doubt a heavyweight, the craft beer culture there is concentrated in just two metropolitan areas (Bay and San Diego) with smatterings on the central coast. Now look at the PNW region (Or. Wa. Al.) and what you see is a very small amount of BAs rating just a fraction of the beers available. Plus most of the stuff produced in Or and Wa do not get distributed widely. It all adds up to the perception of tough PNW raters, but just like the ratings for AALs it's more about the missing data than the score.

 

PUMP PUMP IT
PUMP PUMP IT UP

 

May be true, but I think I'm pretty tough on rating. I've not rated any beer a 5, and only have rated 3 beers 4.75. Most of my favorite beers I've only rated 4.25 and sometimes 4.5. As good as I think some beers are I think there is always room for improvement.

That said, Ive not had any west coast beers that aren't distro'd to the east or even some of the more sought after east coast beers. So. I am not disagreeing with you.

 

See, this line of thinking is what confuses me: "I score high, because I only buy great beer. I only buy great beer, so it must get a high score." If you've determined, before you've put a drop of beer in your mouth, that it's a great beer, of course you're going to give it a high score.

Plus, you have already decided that anything under 3.5 is "just plain bad". Whereas I think of a 3 as the average, that's what I'm expecting when I try a beer I haven't had, I expect it to be fairly typical for it's style. There are a lot of 3's I happily drink again and again, they are not bad beers, they're normal.

 

We also don't even bother adding/reviewing a lot of the beers from WA/OR.

 

I have a few thousand beer ratings to my name on this site. I ultimately just stopped because while the practice is highly relevant in other places I have recently lived (NC, WI, IL), its completely irrelevant in the NW. There are so many beers that just don't even get added (until the 'recent' ability to just tag a score to something without actually rating it, which completely destroyed the integrity of this entire conversation) and nobody reviews anything. I feel liberated, but that's the story here, plain and simple. People don't care about it.