How does rarity affect your reviews?

I don't think that rarity would affect most reviews. If a beer is highly rated already, you must ask yourself: what came first, the great beer or the great reviews for it? My guess is that it's probably a pretty good beer!

 

This is a theory. Don't forget about homers

 

Negatively now a days. I've had a lot of "rare" beers in the past 6 months that weren't that great. I also haven't been rating lately or much at all, but I've definitely not being seeking out "whales" recently with the exception of possibly 2.

 

In general it doesn't. But if it were to affect my reviews in any way it would actually bring the scores down. When a beer is hyped/rated/drooled over it makes your expectation greater. So when I do taste one of these rare beers and it doesn't live up to it's hype, I'm let down. But since there is no category for "how did this beer live up your expectations" I just rate if for what it is, good, great, or bad.

 

I'm more affected by Cantillonness. If a beer manifests traces of Cantillon or demonstrates sufficient Cantillonicity, I'll rate it. But I'm not biased toward products of Brasserie Cantillon; I give Cuvee des Champions only half a Cantillon. Schaerbeekse Kriek gets one and a half. Soleil de Minuit, on the other hand - three Cantillons.

 

i don't rate, don't care, but the top 100 has a lot of rare beers. so i think the conclusion is obvious.

 

There is really a lot going on with this.

• Perception plays a big part in flavor. There is really not much you can do about this. Even if you taste blind, you are still perceiving things other than what you are rating.
• As people said, if a beer is hard to get you tend to have higher expectations for it. This can positively or negatively affect reviews. Sometimes if you really want a beer to be good, it'll actually taste better to you. Sometimes, it could be such a disappointment that you rate it lower than it actually should be.
• There is certainly brewery bias, particularly with sought after and local breweries. For example, it's tough to review a beer poorly if you know the brewer, subconsciously or otherwise. This is particularly true if it's a small batch one off beer in which he or she has a lot of pride.
• Price certainly affects expectations on beer, similar to rarity or how hard a beer is to obtain.
• You could also make the argument that rare beer in general is more of a craft than higher production beer. Make of this what you'd like.

 

I'm not sure this exactly proves a cause and effect relationship.

 

Rarity's aroma and flavor can be subtle to very pronounced

 

Of course rarity affects reviews.

figure 1.1: Splinter Black
figure 1.2: Hellshire 1

 

i cannot speak directly to the top 100 on this site as i do not look at it but i am very familiar with the top 100 on ratebeer.com and i suspect they are basically the same thing in terms of your comment. the ratebeer.com list certainly has many beers that are stupid rare - like, 34 rates and it's considered one of the best beers in the world rare. but if you pick through the list there are enough beers that are widely available and universally respected to allow the ranking system to retain some legitimacy.

as to whether rarity impacts ratings for me personally i have to say that it does. it's really hard to be completely objective when you know the beer is highly rated, very hard to come by, and you'll never see it again. but it cuts both ways. a few years ago i traded for a darkness and I was dissapointed at the low quality of the beer in relation to its high ranking; same goes for kate the great. i think i ultimately rated both beers a bit lower than i should have because the substance didn't meet the hype.

and this is why i really like "top beer" lists that have hundreds, if not thousands, of ratings for the beers on the list. you can really cut through a lot of the psychological bullshit when you're drawing from a sample of hundreds or thousands instead of a relative handful of mostly local ratings.

 

Nothing tastes better than rarity.

 

correct. there are beers that were once rare (e.g., angel's share) that are now common yet the beers retain the high level of rating (at least on ratebeer as far as angel's share goes).

 

no, of course not. but it's the likeliest possibility when you take into context the wale-obsessed clownship culture of ba.

agreed. i think the system prior to the current one (with an ever-increasing minimum review threshold to adjust for review database growth) was far better than the flat minimum of 10 or 20 or whatever it is now. right now, ratings are rarity-dominated. does that mean that rarity affects reviews, or does that mean that homers review highly because that's the second part of the equation to trading for wales (first part being low bottle count)? we'll never know for sure.

 

you're right. i was just looking at the beers of fame list on this site, which i really like. sure, there may be a few beers in there that i do not like simply because of my personal tastes (choklat) but you'd be pretty hard pressed to argue that any of the beers on that list are not great beers you'd enjoy drinking.

so the next question is whether beer geek nation is ready to mature and move to a consumer based rating system that focuses on 1,000s of ratings and consigns the "rarity" factor to a separate, sub-list of inferior validity? i think not.

 

I try to do blind tastings with other beers to mute the rarity "inflation", such as Westy 12 with Pannepot, Rochefort 10, St. Bernardus Abt. 12, St. Amatus. That's also a good way for me to determine my favorite beers within a style.

I think that helps, plus if I don't like a beer I'll pan it, I don't care how rare or highly "rated" it happens to be.

 

How does rarity affect my reviews? It does not what so ever. I dont review and probably never will.

 

If you think rarity doesn't affect reviews you don't know the first thing about psychology.

I particularly have to laugh at the people that say "rarity doesn't have any impact on MY ratings." I do my best to be as objective as possible, as I think most of us do, but I'm also aware that this isn't something you can just will yourself into.

It happens on both sites, but you can actually see it in action over on ratebeer (if you have a premium membership) with their graphs that show score over time. Compare KBS (significantly increased in rarity over time) to the aforementioned Angels Share (significantly decreased in rarity). I bet you can guess what the graphs look like without even looking.

 

it's interesting because on ratebeer you can create your own customized top 50 beer list and one of the variables you can manipulate is number of ratings. here is how the cut-off of the number 50 beer changes according to number of ratings:

600 ratings - 50th beer is Abbaye de Rocs Brune with a score of 4.06
300 ratings - 50th beer is Lost Abbey Framboise de Amarosa with a score of 4.08
150 ratings - 50th beer is older viscosity with a score of 4.09

then when you view the regular top 50 list based on whatever forumla ratebeer uses you find that Goose Island Bourbon County Vanilla is the 50th beer with a score of 4.13.

someone better with numbers than i can probably explain this better but it seems pretty straightforward that on an aggregate level scores are higher with a lower number of ratings. and for those not familiar with ratebeer.com, the difference between a 4.06 and 4.13 is quite large within the context of a beer being in the top 50.

 

agreed.

that's pretty neat. granted, both of those beers have other issues at play (qc issues / backlash with angel's share, and recipe change with kbs). but, like you, i'd bet rarity is the controlling factor. most ba's don't seem to know what they're tasting or how to evaluate it unless the bottle count is listed on the label.