Why isn’t (this beer) in the Top 250?

Seeing pseudo sue on the list and not pillow stacks, or juicy bits, or a handful of other amazing ipas available to me locally has always left me scratching my head. My best guess is that specific areas have inflated ratings due to BAs in the area having nothing else to do except rate and review beers. I live in CO. Our local forum is dead for the most part. There is a lot going on out here, and while beer is great I assume locals use it to enhance other aspects of their lives. This is merely wild speculation, but I have learned to take most Midwest beer ratings with a grain of salt as a result from this.

 

As a partial answer to your question the top 250 is a numbers game as much as popularity contest. The formula is the rating times the number of ratings...
I made visuals...

As you can see kbbs has been around since 2012. And has 860 ratings with an astonishingly high average of 4.9.

BA AASB also has a great average of 4.6. However it’s only been on the site since 2019 and only 2 people have rated it. So it can’t even think about being on a top anything list yet.

comparing with untappd we have 402 ratings with an average of 4.7. This helps confirm (to me anyway)that this beer is indeed very good. It just doesn’t have the numbers on ba yet. Hopefully they’ll keep brewing it and people will continue to rate it.
Cheers.

 

Because the list is already overloaded with them?

 

Wait a minute. Have you even rated it on ba? @micada

 

I’ve always thought that some ratings are artificially high to keep the trading values high and viable. Just my opinion on that, no regional bias just an inclination. When I first joined the site IPAs traded pretty well, now outside of TH it’s mostly BA Stouts and sometimes Sours.

 

Doesn't everyone have their fight club beer? I know a spot that had some B5K sitting and I'm not telling anyone. I go back every week and grab one.

 

This is a long standing problem with Beer Advocate. Some areas have a more active Beer Advocate community in them, and others do not.

This is something my area faces - often times my reviews stand alone for local beers (with a few occasionally rating the more popular breweries). It's not to say my reviews are the best in the city, as there are swarms of people who can review better than me in the local community, but they don't take the time to do it on BA.

 

One of the trending beers that spent a few weeks in the top 5 and is still on the list still doesn't have a photo. The beer is approaching being on the site for a month. Just because a beer gets lots of reviews doesn't mean someone will get around to uploading a photo.

FWIW, I'm still sitting on about a dozen label pictures that I haven't taken the time to crop and resize. Maybe I need to have a beer and edit some photos.....

 

Why pick on the Midwest? Someone years ago did a great analysis of several top beers & the bias of being closer to a brewery. If I recall correctly Florida was the greatest offender hands down but hey, FL has a lot of great beer! No region is immune from homerism, not even my second favorite state Colorado.

There's a lot of reasons things are in the top beers list & others aren't. Someone mentioned number of reviews. Another is expectations. You see a top-rated beer & just expect it's going to be excellent & the score goes up without the reviewer even being aware of it. And yes, I'd agree there are certain reviewers who lean towards locals. I'm sure there are others.

And give me Psuedo Sue over Juicy Bits every day & twice on Fridays...

 

re: Psuedo Sue vs. Juicy Bits, this had me intrigued. I've always partially blamed local bias for some beer's placement on the list, so I wanted to do a breakdown.

Pseudo Sue has 5,107 more ratings and 785 more reviews than Juicy Bits. Psuedo Sue's pDev is a little higher, sitting at 7.52% vs Juicy Bit's 6.03%. That tells me a lot more people have consumed and rated/reviewed Pseudo Sue in the 10 years it has been on BA and thought relatively consistent over the years as have tried Juicy Bits in the 5 years it has been on BA.

Psuedo Sue getting regional (?) distribution makes me think Iowan's and homerism have less to do with it as well. Especially taking a peek at the first page (most recent) of reviews with only 6 of the 25 reviews belonging to someone living in the Midwest.

Interestingly enough, of the first seven (eight come up on the last page, with one not listing a location) reviews for Pseudo Sue, only one came from someone who lives in the Midwest. Of the 23 on the last page of Juicy Bit's reviews, 13 of them are from users listing Colorado as their location. Of those 13 reviews, the average score was 4.273 with a median of 4.25, which is a negative pDev (BA score of 4.31): in other words, Juicy Bits rating has gone up since the original 13 Colorado reviewers wrote their reviews. Potential error here is people changing their location in their BA profile.

Not going to do a full breakdown of Psuedo Sue DDH, but the beer has been on the site for two months less than Juicy Bits and already has more reviews and ratings with a pDev inside the same percentage point. Considering the higher amount of reviews and over double the ratings, that slightly higher pDev isn't a big factor.

I'm not arguing if Juicy Bits should be on the list, just that BA's list are a function of user input and not necessarily limited to regional pockets of users. Sure, the latter can help (and I still believe it does to some extent), but in the case of a beer that has been reviewed over 7 times more than the other, and receives regional distribution, the numbers speak for themselves.

TL;DR: plz review beers so we can have data.

 

I would guess that the list itself would inflate a beer’s ratings more than local bias. If you’re reviewing a Top 250 beer you are probably going to have higher expectations and may give it a slightly higher rating than a beer you’ve never heard of.

 

Then Side Project would crush it even harder.

 

And that's why we can't get any 2 hours from the brewery.

 

Sometimes I wonder if St. Louis's active BA community has contributed to Side Project's success.

In short, it's probably a factor, but not the only factor.

Fun fact: I originally had a comparison between active BA members between Kansas City & St. Louis mentioned in that post, but deleted it I'm often envious of their active BA members over there.

 

This very well could be apart of it too.

I'd be interesting to see if Juicy Bits can climb up ~13 spots to sit in the Top 250, how it would effect their subsequent ratings.

 

I remember a mention in a post of several ba purges in the last few years. It sounds like a lot of locals to that area were banned from ba, and therefore lost a lot of support from that area.

Also... while I’m on the topic. If BBT wasn’t a “one-off” unique batch each time, it would probably be in the top 5 on ba. (Possibly #1)