What Exactly Is A 5.0 Beer Rating?

We are all familiar with ethyl acetate, found in some nail polish removers and badly spoiled wine (it is the stage after vinegar). Once in a great while in infected homebrew. I'd have trouble getting green apple from it. Very well could be some random ester though.

 

Yes. There's a place in Pasadena that always has Pliny on tap, and always serves it way too cold. When I used to go there, I'd plan on having to let it warm for several minutes before taking my first sip.

 

It would make me cry if I knew you put Pliny in the freezer (see my post directly above).

 

Seems perfect, you can let it to warm a bit, but those who like it Cold can also enjoy. You cant do it the other way.

 

No, in this case I didn’t, but all AALs get the freezer treatment.

 

That's why you gave it a 5, ha. Seriously, it's my only perfect 5, too. Have probably drunk more Pliny than any other beer.

 

So in general I believe I understand what you are trying to say, although I think there is a fundamental flaw to that logic. If one rates solely to stylistic guidelines, with the idea that meeting said guidelines makes a beer a 5.0, a problem arises. By definition, for a beer to be a certain style you have to meet certain metrics which are (mostly) objectively defined. So if you are a beer that falls into a certain category than you are a perfect 5.0 beer merely by meeting the metrics to be included in said category? By that logic, inclusion into a certain category essentially predetermines your perfection . If that is all you are considering when rating a beer then by definition any beer that falls into any category is thus a perfect 5.0 beer.

For example, any beer with an OG 1.004-1.050, FG 1.008-1.014, ABV 4.4-5.4%, IBUs 30-50 with mild to moderate malt characters, and high (rather ambiguously defined, here’s the subjectivity) hop characters should be considered a perfect 5.0 American Pale Ale. That’s a pretty ridiculous assertion in my opinion.

Also, I know you did not say this, but more general to the conversation, the statements of rating to style are, I believe, a bit over emphasized. Certainly style should be kept in mind while rating, but that’s only part of it and do we always need to talk about this, isn’t it implied? When rating anything there is general underlying assumption that you are rating that thing against a specific established standard of similar entities. That’s not unique to beer. But there is certainly more to it than that. If you’re rating a restaurant you wouldn’t give it 5 stars just because they served you a hamburger instead of giving you a haircut. You don’t rate a restaurant in comparison to a barbershop. Ratings are intended to provide comparison to established similar entities. That goes without saying for most other things I can think of, but is very often discussed (and really the focus of discussion) in beer reviews/ratings. So to bring that back to the, what i would contend is a rather absurd notion of rating beers SOLELY to style parameters, if one rated anything else in that manner, say rating restaurants “to style”, than any establishment which allowed you to sit down, provided you with food and charged you money for it would be a 5 star restaurant.

I say all that to say that subjectivity is not only inherent, but a complete necessity, and in my opinion not a negative contributor to the “rating” (either formally via a review with numerical rating or informally via even insomuch as merely your enjoyment of something in the current moment) of ANY experience. Life would be pretty drab if we experienced it so concretely. Or perhaps alternatively, if the mere existence of a pale ale being a pale ale makes it a perfect pale, while that’s Zen as shit. So perhaps we have discovered the key to enlightenment. (It’s about to get some kind of combo of existential and esoteric in here and I like it!)

 

I preferred Blind Pig. Not that PtE is not a tasty beer.

 

I like Blind Pig a lot too.

 

Strongly disagree. The vast majority of people are going to drink the beer as it’s served. If you are serving at inappropriate temperatures you are doing a disservice to the beer you are serving (and the majority of your patrons). There are recommended serving temps for different styles that are meant to optimize the profiles of the beers. If you serve someone a 38degree Pliny, or Bourbon County Brand Stout, or Mother of All Storms, or St. Bernardus Abt 12, or Big Foot, etc, etc (you get my point) the significant majority of your clientele will drink it, probably not be impressed, and potentially write it off as being not that good. Serving at an incorrect temperature to appease some with the idea that the rest can or should just wait it out seems like an odd take.

As a broader statement I’ve found that most places that aren’t specifically craft beer bars or breweries serve their craft beer way too cold. I’m with you nc41 when it comes to AALs, the colder the better, but for almost any style not so much. I find myself almost never ordering beer from restaurants/bars/etc unless the place is really beer-centric, partially for that reason (there are other things that contribute like I also feel there’s an abundance of less than pristine tap lines).

 

Agree and disagree. At beer shares you take how it’s presented it would be bad manners imo to bitch about beer temps. Cold beer is my preference,I don’t drink my beers for the purposes of simply rating them to a standard. I like mine cold, I can’t apologize for that.

 

I'm mostly just confused by your statement that an overall 5 will never exist for you because you can't imagine giving a 5 for look or for feel. Look is probably the category that regularly rates highest for me just because I feel like my expectations are so simple.

I see what you were getting at now. Its a good point. How much subjectivity are we admitting into the process? And more importantly, how much are we acknowledging as subjective vs masquerading as objective?

I do still disagree that the only objective criteria are the easily quantifiable attributes though. Of course that's probably just me scrambling to maintain some pretense of objectivity. On closer examination I think that i generally start at 3.75-4 for any criteria that meets the basic expectations (that I have, so already not purely objective) of a given style. I find it a little more reasonable to say that its mostly subjectivity that carries a beer from 3.75-5.

I wonder about terms like mouthfeel, balance, depth of flavor (especially with lager styles that emphasize certain types of malt), and the like which are not strictly quantifiable but are fairly easy for people to agree upon. To me, those are the sorts of things that I think can push a beers rating up a little before we are delving into the purely subjective and personal preference realm.

As usual, these discussions are giving me pause in regards to my own rating style and process, and this time I'm thinking I need to start being a lot more generous with my 5s

 

You think that’s bad....

...once during a move my father in law was helping with the move and ended up putting a case of cellared beer into the unplugged freezer to save space/convenience of moving. He was very helpful and actually ended up doing a big portion of the move without me, which I was grateful for. Once we got the garage fridge to our new house I plugged it in as I was not aware of the bottles in the freezer. Several days later I opened the freezer to start putting stuff in it and discovered the mistake. Now here’s the really tragic part, not only were all the bottles frozen solid but most had expanded to either crack/shatter the glass or pop the cap off. It’s gets even worse, part of what was in that case was a 7 year Marshal Zhukov vertical that I had been cellaring for half a decade and included in the casualties was a quite difficult to obtain 2010 (Batch 2) MZ that was unsalvageable. It stung pretty bad.

Fortunately I did have a second complete vertical cellaring of the same MZ beers (the 2010 I just drank earlier this month actually) so I guess it could have been worse. But man that was still a tough hit.

 

Yep - A typical pale ale is a pale ale and it's not less of a pale ale than a different typical pale ale. (but I'm being serious)

I'm probably doing a bad job explaining my position. It's more of a philosophical one than a practical one.

Styles guides are descriptions of groups of beers. In order for them to work, they need to accurately describe the beers being categorized. Style guides do not describe 1% of the beers in a given category.

So, if one was rating to style, and intending to do so without their personal tastes being a factor, then most beers in a category would hypothetically have to be "perfect" (with "perfect" being the lack of any deviation from the style guide).

But people don't actually do this when they rate beers (and I'm not saying they should). They differentiate beers according to their subjective impression - giving one beer a higher score than the other. Which is all fine and good. I'm actually putting value on subjectivity and removing value from the notion of objectively "rating to style" by saying all this.

 

I'm starting to notice a pattern.

 

If many "deviate," I doubt most could be perfect. And so many do deviate in one way or another.

My friend sent me a picture of a Kolsch he was drinking at a local micro. Very cloudy and flat as Nebraska (nevermind that it was served in a .5 liter mug, but that's another gripe).

It could have been spot-on for aroma and flavor, but that appearance would bring my totals way down from perfect.

 

I think rather than wrestle with the concept of a "5" score, it is much better to start with a "3".

A "3" should be an average beer. A decent drink, representative of the style, with nothing to differentiate it tremendously from the masses. Or else a beer that has a few above average points balanced by a few below average points.

Using that as the baseline, a "4" should be an excellent beer, and a "5" should be otherworldly.

However it should come as no surprise that not everyone uses that scale. Of all the reviews posted to this site in 2020, the average score was 3.99. I suppose this could be partially explained away by the fact that most of us look for good beers, and would prefer not to be drinking (or reviewing) anything that we would rate a "2" or below. However if you assume that selection bias applies just as much to your buying styles as those of the site population, it is fair to assume that an "average" beer on this site scores a 3.99, and anything below this score would be considered a below average beer.

I don't have access to the 2020 score distribution, just the "average". It would probably be better to work off a median score, and then calculate a distribution so that you can see:

Tier 1: this beer scores in the bottom 10 percentile of all beers reviewed on this site.
Tier 2: this beer scores in the bottom 11-30 percentile of all beers reviewed on this site.
Tier 3: this beer scores in the 31 - 50th percentile of all beers reviewed on this site.
Tier 4: this beer scores in the 51st - 70th percentile of all beers reviewed on this site.
Tier 5: this beers scores in the 71st - 90th percentile of all beers reviewed on this site.
Tier 6: this beers scores in the top 10 percentile of all beers reviewed on this site.

So raw scores would become less important than the forced rank. And it might be that a beer that scores a mean review score of 3.5 actually falls into the lowest Tier. If you wanted, you could use the same methodology to score the beer against all beers on the site, as well as its peers within beer type/category.

I know that one of the beers I reviewed last year I actually bought a six pack and threw five cans in the trash. I gave that beer somewhere around a 1.5 score. And yet the same beer I was reading reviews where the reviewers were saying things like "will not drink again" and "expected a lot more" and they were still scoring it over a 3.

 

Many would deviate in one way or another - SRM, clarity, ABV, etc. But if a majority of commercial beers deviated (making them less than “perfect” by that criteria) then the style guideline would likely not be properly representing the beers being classified as such. That could happen (and could result in new categories) but that wouldn’t be the norm.