Thoughts on the latest updates? Top 250, etc.

Try looking at the Top New Beers list.

 

Why should a one-off beer that most people will never see get on to the top 250 list? Eg., available by growler only.

 

But now think of the similar caliber breweries in California or Florida or Missouri that you won't get to hear about because of the new system. Is the trade off worth it? Limiting everyones knowledge of world class breweries and beers so that the long established breweries that everyone already know about get to fill up and overwhelm the list?

 

A while back I did a comparison with the top 250 and 250 of fame. There were 41 beers that appeared on both lists under the old system. Today there are 81 beers on the list!

Looks like the new ratings system is giving a more balanced list including more classic beers than before. It used to be only ~16% of the top 250 were 'classic' beers. Now it is up to about 32%. Seems reasonable to have a third of the list be classic representations of awesome beers...

But yeah, if you ever feel the need to send some of that now (apparently) crap other half and trillium my way...

 

I did, many of those beers now have 10ish reviews. That is such bad statistics to be worthless. Many of those beers will not pan out but we won't know until more data is collected.

 

Most every beer is readily attainable if you know about it in time (simple trade). If you don't know about it for a year, you will never get a chance.

 

I can see your complaint about the new list now. For me I just want to keep up with great beer. I couldn't care less if it's been brewed for 10 years or if it's the first batch. If your reason for looking at the top 250 is to see the new beers making an appearence than this change isn't good for your purpose of the list. I like that a beer like Dfh 90 minute or boulevards Saison Brett get on there. Those are great under appreciated beers that weren't going to be on the list because they aren't new and don't attract hype.

 

That is demonstrable. Set up your proof and make it happen.

 

So you don't mind disinfranchising those who care not to play the trading game?

 

To me, the beer of fame list accomplished the goal of showing the world DFH 90 and saison brett. I direct every new to craft beer person to beer of fame because its a perfect list of the greatly established beers. Now both lists do nearly the same, so I don't see the value in the change.

 

I am with you on this one!

Now that I think of it, wondering if any Cellarmaker beers are on the list, they are in same boat as OH and Trillium.

 

You still have the new beers list.

 

Westy 12 had the biggest jump up...did barrel aged abraxas have the biggest dip? seems like it

 

So what you want is a list of good beers that most everyone around the country can find in their local beer store. That is the purpose of the beer of fame list. The top 250 list was suppose to be the best beers in the world, regardless of how far they distribute or whether they make enough the be available all the time. If you keep seeing these beers pop up on the list from a brewery not by you, maybe you will now want to go out do a beer-cation there to enjoy these great beers. But with the change, you will never know. It will be filled with just more Great Lakes, Dogfish, Victory, Founders and so on that most everyone either knows about, or you could have learned about through the beer of fame list.

 

In terms of breweries represented it looks like:

Old list had 85 breweries represented, and the new list has 115, so the new list is less concentrated.
Distribution looks like:

 

I know people love to talk about top "N" lists, they are very popular in the media, especially around the new year, where people love to argue about the merits of their favorite making the list or not, or their relative position in the list. But these lists are really just there to spur discussion and controversy.

Can we please step away from personal biases for a moment? While I understand the good intentions of this change, trying to get back to the roots and favor quality over quantity. The simple fact is that this change has thrown out the vast majority of the ratings/review data, effectively lowering the overall quality of the average ratings and scores. This is basic high school statistics, quantity is the best way to improve your data and lower your standard deviation errors. Does anyone disagree with this? Does anyone really have any unbiased evidence that by throwing out the majority of the ratings/review data, the overall averages have gotten any better?

If they really wanted to go the high quality route, the only way to get good a highly "qualitative" rating and score for a beer is to only allow a panel of "experts" to contribute to the average. By allowing anyone with an account to review any beer, the best way to get good reliable results is by getting a large sample size. This is the best way BA can continue to contribute useful ratings to the masses, by allowing every vote to count. If you want to give quick ratings a lower weight than full reviews, that is fine, at least you won't be throwing away perfectly useful statistical data.

 

So far as I'm concerned the top 250 list is nothing more than a popularity contest and doesn't tell me much useful that I need to know so I don't really care what happens to it.. Also I've never liked the introduction of "ratings only" simply because it encouraged people to not tell us the information I need to know to make a purchasing decision when buying beers in PA, where most beer is sold by the case and bottle shops are few and far betweenn because they have to buy quite expensive licenses and are required to serve food and beer both for onsite consumption and for take out.

I can understand quite well your reaction and dislike for something new happening as I've been through changes on this site more than once already but on the whole I think going back to reviews only has several benefits for the site and most people who use it.

 

The new top 250 is laughable. There are beers in there that haven't been reviewed in over a year. tons of old beers high up due to the fact that years ago you could only rate a beer by doin an entire review. Might as well change the list to 'top 250 pretty good beers that lots of people drank a few years ago'

 

Biggest "winners and losers" list - top 20 beers that moved up or down the lists:



This obviously excludes beers that fell off the list completely or are new entirely.

 

If BA is really about respecting beer then give us the ability to choose whether reviews matter for ratings lists. We need a simple checkbox "exclude non-reviewed beers". Let the default be checked and very quickly many of us will uncheck the option. It's just not realistic to expect everyone to review a beer and just because some people aren't verbose doesn't mean that their ratings don't count.

Mike