Proposed Updates to Top Rated Beer Lists

I am not a Top 250 ticker and I am someone looking out for new local options that stand out, so these changes would certainly be welcome for me. I've mentioned this in the Top State Beers thread, but it's hard to discover new breweries (unless you just go to whatever is out there) since the lists are already congested or even dominated by established breweries. Hopefully, this evens the playing field a little and allows for someone who does something really well to breakthrough. Based off my criteria, I welcome these changes.

 

Per the 'active' - I'd say allow active & inactive to be apart of the lists. If anything, beers landing in 'inactive' can be more easily flagged by BA users to 'retire' them. Keeping this process manual means there could be some more evidence for when a beer is truly retired vs. simply not active on BA.

Personally, I'm less than thrilled with bumping the BA score threshold down to five, but ultimately, I think it's the right move. Even the more frequently rated/reviewed beers from breweries local to me are only hitting ≤ 8 ratings at best. That's after several re-releases.

It could create more of a mess than anything, but anyway to supplement beer listings under 10 ratings/reviews with an averaged Untappd score? Probably a PITA to link them all, with the different naming conventions and all that, but wanted to throw it out for consideration.

 

I’m a little concerned about a one-off that gets (only) five reviews getting an exaggerated placement in the top 250. 5 reviews at a popular a brewery is not a lot. In the long run, I don’t think this helps more obscure breweries get recognized.

 

Personally, from a conceptual standpoint, I think a minimum of 10 ratings for a beer to be on a communally created global top beers list is too low rather than too high. If 10 is too high from a practical standpoint, then I’d question the purpose of even having such a conceptually compromised consumer driven list.

 

Regarding the "active beers only" idea, I've run across several beers marked as retired that have apparently been pulled out of mothball status for re-release, the most recent being Listermann's Maple Chickow. How is retirement status currently determined, for beers that aren't one-offs but also aren't necessarily on a regular schedule?

 

Sadly... Welcome 250 kinds of Pastry Stouts.
My suggest - The beer with 5 ratings will be to able to include in BA rankings but not more one year. If the beer cannot collect more than 10 for year the beer will remove from any BA rankings.

 

Perhaps you should consider modifying this with the addition of “inactive.”

 

A little bit of a tangent here, but a long time ago there was discussion about some sort of 'handicap' factor to be applied to less popular styles that would help great beers in those styles reach the 'top' lists. Did that ever happen, or should it be part of the discussion in this thread?

 

While I understand the hesitation from some regarding lowering the necessary ratings to 5, this proposal might actually help get the Canadian list (as well as others I’d presume) move out of 2014.

Here, we suffer from too few users rating or reviewing beers. I’m not sure how that will ever change. We also see mediocre breweries that distribute to the US take far too many spots on the list. The breweries that most local beer drinkers would mention as being ‘among the best’ are almost completely absent from the list. I don’t know if the proposed changes will help make the list more reflective of the current beer scene here, but they might.

If you take one of the most popular styles, NEIPA, you’ll find next to none of the generally acknowledged best Canadian makers of the style on the list currently. Just from Ontario and Quebec alone, Messorem Bracitorium, Bas Canada, Wood Brothers, Badlands, Barncat, Third Moon should dominate the list. They don’t. This would be like Other Half, Tree House, Monkish etc., not making a top list in the US, because Celis or Pete’s Wicked Ale are still holding down spots.


One other thought. For the tickers, perhaps an annual archived Top 250 list would be a nice thing to have easy access to.

 

I can see it being a big can of worms to create factors to use, and you don't need that right now. Anyone who wants to see top beers in a particular style can go to the style page and find the top beers there.