Changes: Beer Hads, Full Reviews & Ratings

Not stoked about this.

If you have "had" the beer, write a review. The number rating that you provide means nothing without context or explanation. The change in minimum character requirement is also a bummer... if you can't come up with a decent description of the beer that you're grading, you shouldn't be reviewing it in the first place.

Smells like RateBeer. I sincerely hope that the BA community proves me wrong, but I'm skeptical.

 

Not sure how I feel about the hads being added to the overall score. I use the "had" almost exclusively for my own records to keep track of beers and give it a simple rating to remind me whether or not to seek it out again.

Do not like the minimum word count decrease at all. This will encourage more ticking and less reviewing. Oh well, I know enough by now that I take it all with a grain of salt anyway.

 

As someone who exclusively does full reviews (that are admittedly too long) and has never done a "had", I don't know how I feel about this. I definitely expect it to falsely inflate or deflate rAvgs. As others have said, this also encourages ticking, which, to me, is a practice that is opposed to craft beer culture in that it is not really about enjoying beer anymore. Also, 100 characters is far too low. Seriously, 100 characters is nothing. It is less than a Tweet, and we all know how useless most of those are...

The only welcome change is the addition of .25 increments for ratings, but even that probably won't be something I'll use. How can one discern between a 3.25 and a 3.5 mouthfeel? What about a 2.5 and 2.75 aroma?

Rabble, rabble, rabble, we don't like change.

 

I can't wait for the app

 

I liked having the differentiation between hads and reviews. I basically used my had list for beers I had drank but couldn't remember enough to do a full review, so basically they weren't very reliable ratings.

It basically feels a bit like you're trying to make BA look like ratebeer too.

Also the bit at the bottom of the Top Beers lists is broken I think. It tells me I've had 0 of them when I have had quite a few.

 

Don't care for these changes, but with staff and growth comes the need for more consideration to allowing breweries greater exposure, albeit dumbed down exposure aimed at a dumber audience, I guess.

Also, tickers seem to be a strange group to court. True, they buy beers from every brewery, there's that. But most of them buy that one beer and it's on to look for the next one to notch on gun. I view their input, and "had"'s in general, as the tiniest bit more than valueless. But then, that is true of how I view much of "improvement" the modern world offers

 

I guess I'm not crazy about this, but hey, whatever. I just think it sucks that when I go to read reviews, I have to sift through a bunch of numbers with no text, which ultimately means nothing to me and doesn't help me get an understanding for what the beer is about. And there are more BAs who click "had" than actually review and give their thoughts, so within time we'll probably be going through 8-10 pages just to find a text written review.

 

While I value write ups on beers, how many times can the same thing be written over and over?
Its the same as beertubers. Its golden, smells of pine, good lacing, yada yada yada. 4.0/5.0

Thats nice and all, but if the site has the ability to harness the opinions of many others (who may not have the time or grammar to write a unique review) why not add to the feedback of the beers? The data is there, and whether some longwinded reviewers like it or not, its ALL subjective.

 

I'm also firmly of the view that lumping hads and reviews together will significantly compromise the reliabilty and objectivity of a beer's rating/score.

The need to do a full review to contribute to the score, combined with the prevailing attitude here against half-arsedness (as opposed to Ratebeer reviews) is why I generally place a good degree of trust in ratings on this site.

Adding hads into the mix - without at least assigning them a massively lower weighting - will remove the most significant restraint that currently restricts brewers friends/acquaintances, shameless hype-train folks and other rent-a-crowd types from hijacking the system.

 

This is my biggest issue, especially on my phone

 

My honest opinion is that this hurts the overall appeal of BA and makes it too similar to untappd and Ratebeer.

I don't like that all my reviews and Hads are lumped together. Hads mean nothing to me. Reviews are there so I can use my tasting notes.

Looks like the demand for Heady Topper is going to explode....

 

To be honest, I never used Hads, and have always been thinking it'd be nice to have a way to keep a tally of what I've had. I've always envied people who have an encyclopedic memory for commercial beers they've tried. I think I'll try it. Combined with a coming mobile app, and I could really like that.

100 word minimum, though? No offense, but I honestly don't feel very good about that. It's like the site has simultaneously made the Hads more central and lowered the bar for reviews. I work on every one of my reviews for every bit of 20-30 minutes - I write every one like it is going to be a hang tag at a bottle store or read by the brewer, and it burns me to see five sentence fragments count as a review, or to see yahoos say they completed 1000 reviews in less than three years. The low quality of some of the dashed off reviews has always been one of my biggest and longest running complaints here.

Leave the Hads for the tickers. Leave the reviews for those of us who are serious about actually reviewing a beer.

Please take this in the spirit intended. You guys do a great job.

 

Agree with spicelab. Hads should have a different value, say .25 of full reviews, or just post 2 seperate scores. I only do Hads because I don't yet know how to review, so it's just a guide to tell me what I liked. I hate to think that counts as much as an experienced reviewer.

 

Any way to have those blue pens come back? Looking at the Top 100 Canada, nearly had a heart attack when it *seemed* that i had reviewed zero of them

Was at 95 and close to finishing the Top 100. Obviously, this changes things. Oh well, the chase is on

FYI, the Bros. always do this with changes and then there are tweaks. Remember the Top 100 overhaul on the old site?

 

Kind of torn on this. In one way, it will bring more light to some deserving beers that may not have been getting a lot of attention. More beer gets bought up, and (hopefully) the brewery will make more of it. On the other hand, anyone can effortlessly go to a beer, give it a 1 or a 5 without any real solid reasoning behind it (hell, maybe they haven't even actually tried the beer!) and it will be factored into the scores. Having review-only scores weeded this out pretty well, but now... who knows. I don't really like the 100 word min... If you can't come up with that many words, why are you writing a review?

Also - does anybody know why when you look at the Top Beers list, Heady Topper has a 4.7, but if you go to the "Beers of Fame" list, it only has a 4.47 ? Still some kinks getting worked out, I assume? Or do these lists get calculated differently?

 

Well, I am taking a look at the top 100 popular beers and are hard pressed to find an imposter there. I am sure this was not a change that wasn't fully thought out, so I am not so quick to jump on this being a bad thing. I would probably be more inclined to review given the lower character limit as well(says the guy who has only reviewed PTY).

 

I am the minority here but I only use the 'hads' function. If I wanted creative writing I would enroll at a community college. I appreciate the time reviewers take to opine and the fruity/soapy/spicy/piney notes of an IPA, but I could care less. I use this function to track my 'hads' and further my tick.

I don't just throw up a number and call it good, I do take time and consideration to create my had. The new way vs. the old way, I don't really care. I am sure the BA founders/facilitators know what they are doing, and IMO they've been doing it well (Brown Nosing Implied). Cheers!