Poll: How many reviews validate a beer?

On Untappd, there is no number that will validate a beer for me. This site is a pain in the ass to access reviews from on my phone so I don't even bother but 10 written reviews would probably be good enough for me.

The homer fanboys and traders overrating everything make the ratings on most sites useless.

 

Pretty much this. I don't know anybody who uses Untappd for the beer ratings/reviews but those that do are doing it all wrong

 

Spouses is a loaded word....

 

It's hard to say.
I pretty much ignore numbers-only ratings and look at written reviews, but the “number of” is a total of both.
So two or three reviews can tell me what I need to know about the beer while 100 ratings might not.

 

I think most actually do use untappd, there are so many beers out there and many on here have 3 reviews while on untappd I'll see 800. I've called out abuse on this site in the past I recall one brewery in Georgia where an individual started 5 user names on here simulataneousy and started throwing up perfect scores propping up the trade value and then people found out how mediocre said BA stout was. Sure you could do this on untappd but there is so much more volume of reviews there, hard to get that kind of score manipulation.

 

Only takes 1 for me as long as that 1 is mine!

 

You're right that manipulating Untappd ratings is difficult or impossible, which is good, but there's no quality control to the ratings either. The only qualifications one needs to submit a beer rating is access to the internet. It's a pure popularity contest that doesn't necessarily say whether the beer is good. I think that's what @tzieser is getting at.

If you were looking at movie ratings on Rotten Tomatoes do you put more value in the critic scores [i.e. the Tomatometer(TM)] or the audience score [non-critics]? Sometimes the results are very different. You have to decide which mean more to you, or if any matter at all.

 

Is there really quality control here other than booting a bunch of fake reviews if one person has multiple user names? I agree on your rotten tomatoes analogy. I wish more would use BA for reviews of late. There are certain people like SteveDore on here who I know I can trust their scores beyond some random check in. It would be cool if BA put more value in veteran trader/user reviews that have been on here for 5+ years but that's a lot of work to enable that and the site prob would get a lot of push back.

 

When looking at beer reviews, select "top reviewers" under "sort by."

 

One review might be enough, unless I felt the reviewer was full of BS.
I look at the reviews, how, and where are they were done and try to form a opinion, using objective/subjective information to come up with a some what informed. opinion.
In other words, My BS detector is set to Max! 11!

 

To the first part I agree with you, there's not really much quality control here. Just like Untappd, the only qualification to review on Beer Advocate is access to the internet [and not being such a blatantly obvious cheater the mods ban you]. So, the overall number scores can still be garbage and IMO for some styles they really are.

However, as you point out there are credible individuals on Beer Advocate, so the long-form written reviews here give everyone the opportunity to do their own quality control.

I agree. I brought up something similar back when the "The Bros" score was removed/deemphasized from the site. I kind of liked it as an "expert" check on the popular score, but I get why they did it. They have to make the site for everyone, not their egos.

If I had my way, I would create a system for cicerones to submit proof of their qualifications to the site to get a special tag on their account. Then users could sort the beer reviews and scores of cicerones separately... like the Rotten Tomatoes critic score vs audience score... but that's beyond the original topic here.

 

I agree that this’ll be interesting. Good post!

 

Yeah, you basically surmised my point. Untappd has several different features and, in my opinion, the overall scores are pretty much the most useless aspect of the app. If you use the app longer than 10 minutes (not ‘you’ personally, ranbot) you’ll find that the “Find a beer” and the “Nearby Venues” functions are much more useful than a few thousand >150 character “reviews” (more like “notes”) from unverified users that may or may not know next to nothing about beer.

Untappd is a terrific personal beer ticker/tracking app. It’s much faster to access than BA when you’re on the move and it’s a much more fluid experience from top to bottom on mobile. It’s very handy when you’re at a bar or restaurant and cant remember if you’ve tried a certain beer, you can quickly punch it in or scan the barcode and see if you’ve checked-in or not. I think it’s also really great for having friends that you know ‘IRL’ and then you can see why they’re drinking and what they thought of that beer. You can follow your favorite verified beer shops and see what they got in that day. It’s a good app for traveling, if you’re in a city you’re unfamiliar with you can quickly see who had what beer at what place.

I really don’t understand some of the hostility/defensiveness some BA’s have towards Untappd. Comparing BA to Untappd is like comparing an Encyclopedia to a school year book or an Almanac. Just because they’re both books does not make them the same thing. I think a lot of it is out of ignorance or fear of change, as if Untappd is going to replace BA or some shit like that. It’s weird. Speaking of which, enough of the snobbery already; who really gives two shits if User X from Worcester only gives 5 stars to Tree House beers but not Monkish. Do you really put that much weight into beer reviews? You really can’t just try a beer for yourself and see what you think without doing research? I thought this is BeerAdvocate, not BeerReviewAdvocate. BA is not perfect either, I can name several Pooh-Bah, Mevyn level users who’s reviews are laughably bad, as if they were written in crayon or something. Experience certainly does not always mean quality.



Sorry for the rant.

 

You just pointed out how I think EVERY number ratings is entered. Which isn't to say by people who put fake ratings up because they want to skew the ratings, but also because of the other many reasons people have to put up fake numbers that don't and can't help with an honest description of the ASTMO of the beer.

 

O- A good BeerAdvocate comment

 

If I had more money to pick a beer off a shelf on a whim, I would choose the "Don't care" option. Limited funds though, makes me a little more choosy. 50-100 is a good number to balance out extremes. People who give a low score because of infected bottles and others who are blown away by everything they taste. I'll still try something if it interests me, but rating matters more to me if price point goes up. A brew doesn't necessarily have to be validated for me, but make no mistake, it's a gamble. Caveat Emptor.

 

This is a subject I have wanted to talk about for a while. How the hell can something be number one on the BA list if it has been brewed once and less than a 1000 people have reviewed.BS.
And has only been brewed once BS. Those top beers are complete bullshit with heady topper and Pliny the elder being the only true tested top beer with over 15000 reviews now that that is a good sample!! The other top 5 are shit as far as I am concerned. Beers with very limited accessibility should have to be reviewed by at least a thousand times before beers should hit that list. If the brewers can't reproduce it consistently then luck was involved more than skill.

 

I really don't pay attention to them. I like to find out on my own which beer I like and which one I don't. I don't like someone to make the decision for me.

 

I believe 30 or more is considered statistically significant, so I rounded up to 51-100.

 

Written and cognizant reviews, I think probably 10-20 (if they aren't stacked out by local bros, do people still do that on here?) ... but mindless ticks like untappd I never trust. Zero faith.