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

This isn’t complicated. No. End of discussion.

 

Ok, so this thread is purely academic, and it’s value we are discussing.

It’s still an unreasonable quality to evaluate. Value is even more intangible than cost. For example, I highly value some beers because of nostalgia. Nostalgic feelings are 100% unique to each individual. Then consider seasonal or situational value. Octoberfest in May just isn’t the same, and some folks (myself excluded) find an Imperial Stout to be less enjoyable during the dog days of Summer.

I value a beer from a friend more than some random stranger, but then again if the random stranger offers me a beer just to be friendly then that changes the metric.

None of this has anything to do with the beer itself, and very little is transitional within a community. AND these are just a few examples.

 

Or you could just message Todd. Earlier in this thread Todd said the same things as the person you quoted. In fact,, he has said that same thing consistently since you have been a member.here. Just sayin'

 

No problem, I’m here for you. Got any other layup questions I can solve for you?

 

Your contributions to this post are outstanding!

If you click on a members avitar you will see "Ignor" at the bottom right. Click on ignor if you do not wish to see that members posts.

Buh Bye......click.

 

Conversation is good. Even after a definitive pronouncement. Sometimes the conversation reinforces the result, sometimes it causes a reevaluation, and often it opens the door to other possibilities within and/or outside the original discussion.

Always conversation enlivens the community. Thinking differently and challenging the accepted keeps a community engaged and evolving. I enjoyed this one in particular, because it took on a life of its own and grew.

 

It would be much more useful to simply add the price one paid — whether to the review or to some separate field that can average the inputs over the past 12 months or so.

… Not that I’m advocating for the latter. A constant reminder that I pay a lot more for beer in Pennsylvania than folks on average would not be good for my blood pressure.

 

TripAdvisor has been using value rating as a criteria for restaurant and hotel reviews. Is that a flawed method they’ve included or what would be the difference for how it applies to a hotel/restaurant vs beer? Hotel costs can fluctuate greatly based on many factors as well.

 

How to review and this topic have been discussed many, many times in the past going back to when talking about reviewing was a very popular idea, and reviewing itself was the thing that set this site apart, before it even was possible to just leave numbers. BA's position on the issue always was clear that $$$ have no place in reviews, and it is likely this thread and the other would have have been nuked at birth, and everyone would understand why. Just sayin'

 

I question this on the grounds that there is no mention of including or excluding price/value in a review, according to "How to Review a Beer", which was last updated in 2014.

Was it stated not include price in prior versions? I think this is an example of "Tribal Knowledge" or a generally agreed upon practice. Cheers and Good Morning.

 

Like the majority, I don’t want to see “value” as a rating category … but I do think there’s something to the idea that a lot of consumers are increasingly interested in value.

Playing off @AlcahueteJ’s idea for a “top value list,” perhaps NextGlass could partner with a retailer — like Other Half, whoever — who have a list of in-season, in-stock beers with distinct retail prices, from which you could do a simple BA score / price / ounce calculation and come up with a quick “top 10” or “top 25” value beers of the month list.

Possibly a better idea for other platforms, but you get the idea. There’s some obvious monetization options there. If one didn’t want to partner with a single retailer and to retain “objectivity” or whatever, you’d probably want a bot or something scrubbing price data from a variety of outlets and coming up with some average price for each beer.

 

Since this is a thread about adding something officially I guess I should have said more clearly that officially there won't be mention of price in any way is BA policy. It always has been discussed as improper. That is, when people cared about reviews and reviewing, and the topic was discussed here often, including with Todd and Jason.

 

It seems that discussions like this one could be avoided or eliminated by clarification of the BA How to Rate Beer guidelines to say explicitly that "Cost and/or perceived value should not be considered in assigning numbers to any rating category" if that is, in fact, Todd's current intent. Right now, the door is left open to considering anything that influences the rater's "overall" drinking experience and "drinking experience" (words taken directly from the description of how to rate "overall" in the "How to Rate Beer" section) is not defined, despite some strong feelings about what it should/should not include.
Times change and members change. IMO, no discussion or poll is bad, but some reactions to it can be.

 

I don't think Todd meant to stifle anyone from writing anything in their reviews. I think he meant officially price never will be a consideration in the rating and reviewing systems of beers here.

As far as what are proper and best ways to review, I wish those discussions still took place here, but they don't.

 

I understood your original post, allow me to clarify.

I do not think it should be a category for beer reviews. However, I do think it's an interesting idea. I wonder if a beer's rating (based on what we do now) could be somehow combined with value, and generate a separate rating/score from the original.

So you'd have your overall rating, and a value rating. But the latter doesn't influence the former.

Not sure if that explains what I'm saying or not.


I do want to use a real world example though for why I think it should not added as a sixth category. Heady Topper is about $3 per can from the brewery. If a bar in the Boston area acquires it, they typically sell it for about $10 per can. Does that make the beer taste more than three times worse or better?