Poll: Should “value” be added as a beer rating category?

This thread is a spinoff of a spinoff. In this thread (and particularly this post) I suggested adding “value” as a rating category along with look, smell, taste, etc. I hasten to add that people who are opposed to including this rating, for whatever reason (they think it’s irrelevant, they don’t know the price of the beer, etc.) could simply opt out by selecting “N/A” and nothing would change from the current system. As noted in my other post, this criterion could be weighted lower than the other categories in the algorithm that calculates the total score (say 5% of the total), but it would still influence the score to some degree.

I’m curious what folks think, and interested in exploring this idea further. Clearly, based on the results of the other poll so far, a majority of people factor a beer’s price/relative value into their ratings/reviews at least some of the time—so would it be a good or bad thing to include this factor in a beer’s score?

And just to be clear—let’s say you spent $35 on a fancy barrel-aged, wax-topped bottle and you love it so much you think it’s worth every penny. You could absolutely give that beer a 5 for value. Likewise, you could buy a terrible beer for very little money—and still find that it wasn’t worth what you paid, and give it a 1. Just like the other categories, value would be largely subjective, and you could then use your review to explain the thinking behind your rating.

Interested to hear people’s thoughts. Cheers!

 

As noted in the OP, you could opt out of submitting this rating for any reason—including gifts, trades, moral objection, etc. In my experience the difference between the lowest and highest price for the same beer varies by no more than about 10%—so you have a general idea about its price range, and if you have no idea you can just opt out.

You are correct that the brewery has little to no say in the price, unless you bought the beer directly from them, so in that sense I get that it would be unfair to the brewery to ding them for something that’s beyond their control. But other things are also beyond a brewery’s control that also affect a beer’s ratings: Did that IPA just sit on a room-temperature shelf at Total Wine for 6 months before someone reviewed it? Were the tap lines clean at the brewpub where you ordered the beer that you’re now reviewing? All kinds of other variables that are out of the brewery’s hands also affect our perception of their beer, so why should a beer’s relative value be off limits?

 

I think either you misunderstand my idea or I misunderstand your post. I’m suggesting that in the beer rating/reviewing process, in addition to look, smell, taste, mouthfeel, and overall, a sixth rating category—value—be added. This category would be different from the others in that it would be voluntary, and people could opt out if they wanted to. But for those who did rate a beer’s relative value it would affect the beer’s total score somewhat.

I would argue that all of the categories are subjective—how “good” a beer smells or tastes, on a scale from 1 to 5, is entirely subjective.

 

When you review a beer, I think the site automatically calculates the total score the number in red next to “/5” at the top of your review) based on a weighted algorithm (not sure if that’s the right word)—for example, look is 15% of the score, smell is 25%, taste is 25%, mouthfeel is 20%, and overall is 15% (I’m making up the numbers for this example, but each category score is run through a weighted “multiplier” that equals 100% of the total score). Each of the five categories is not equal, i.e., 20% for each category. So if you adjusted the numbers to make room for, say, an extra 5% to be applied to “value,” but for people who selected “N/A” for that category it would use the existing algorithm, I don’t know why it wouldn’t work.

You could take 1 percentage point from each of the other five categories—or some other permutation that doesn’t have a very significant impact. And again, if you opt out by selecting “N/A” under value, it applies the current calculation.

Also, the category wouldn’t be “price” but “value.” There’s a meaningful difference between these terms.

Do you know what the current categorical scoring breakdown is? I had it somewhere but forget where I saved it. If look is 5%, what are smell, taste, etc.?

 

OK so the current breakdown is:
Appearance: 6%
Smell: 24%
Taste: 40%
Mouthfeel: 10%
Overall: 20%

I would actually leave the first four categories alone and take the Value score entirely out of Overall. You could do Overall 15%, Value 5%, or Overall 10%, Value 10% etc. (and of course, if you opt out of rating value by selecting N/A, the full 20% would go to the Overall score). It seems most people who implicitly rate value under the current breakdown use the Overall score to do that anyway, so this would just allow people to be more specific about what part of Overall they are attributing to the beer’s relative value.