Article about beer ratings vs beer competitions

Some styles receive relatively few entrants, and there are quite often some mind-boggling winners too. I think they just have to be mediocre or slightly good beers plus a lot of entries over time and then yes, they'll win some awards somewhere. For most competitions they do not list the number of entrants or list the entrants for the public to see, and I think there are some interesting reasons why they may like to keep it this way.

Ratings on these sites are good for big picture evaluations - a 90's beer is rarely mediocre or poor, and a low 80's and below beer is rarely great. There's a few style caveats in what I just said, plus a few caveats for breweries that don't distribute out of state (huge Homerism factor in those breweries then), but for the big picture the reviews here are good for some broad generalizations.

 

Considering this is the "gist" of his brewery, I'd say he's wise to covet and court the attention of the BA types:

"I have unreasonably high standards for beer, born of the fact that I traded bottles with other obsessed geeks around the country for years and have lived in a variety of great beer towns. While I was authoring tweets for Stone, I got more tasty free beer than I could ever drink myself, which didn’t make me any more reasonable. So now that I get to be the decider, I’m taking it to 11—as the kids say—to ensure that Modern Times’ beer meets my unrealistic standards for dankness."

And this, FWIW, is the description of one of his flagship beers:

"This beer is a blast wave of dankness. It's hella dank sauce. It's the stickiest of the icky. It's... Alright, I'm done. It's an amber IPA loaded up with a crapload of Nelson hops, which are some of the fruitiest, dankest, most epically aromatic hops that sweet, sweet money can buy."

 

It would be interesting to see some data on a few beers that have been around a while and entered in hundreds of competitions. To the author's point, brewers only tell us when and what medal a beer wins but they don't tell us how many entrants in each competition or where the beer placed in all the other competitions.

I'd be willing to wager there are some beers that tend to always place in the top 20% or so but never seem to medal.

 

I so want this beer already.

 

Sounds like this article could have been a call to arms to boycott competitions and drastically reduce the emphasis that we place on medals. But it didn't quite go there for some reason. Instead, it seems like he's just trying to get some free publicity for his beers in lieu of the "thousands of dollars on entry fees" he'd have to spend to get some critical praise. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

In competitions beers are judged on how well they meet a pre-specified style; on sites like this they are judged on how happy they make us. Two different ways of looking at things- even before you get to talking about 'qualifications' and the like.

 

I wouldn't say I "court" the attention of BA types. I am a BA type, it's where I first immersed myself in craft beer culture, and I was so fond of the community here, I ended up writing an article for the magazine. Return of the Belgian Beer Fest was one of the top beer experiences of my life. So this is just an extension of the philosophy I've formed as part of this community.

Also, as I've mentioned on other threads, the marketing rhetoric is meant to be satirical, for the most part. Although that beer really is a blast wave of dankness. Once we added the Mosaic to the blend, it went to the next level. Very excited to brew it soon.

Your cynicism about my motives is a little perplexing. It wasn't a call to arms because I didn't want it to be a call to arms. Brewers can make their own decisions about where they put their beer, and it's not for me to tell them otherwise. My goal was just to offer an alternative viewpoint. I also think it would be inappropriate for a brewery that doesn't even have beer on the shelf yet to call for a boycott of anything. This was just one guy's opinion.

Cheers & thanks,
Jacob McKean
Modern Times Beer

 

C'mon, man, shit or get off the pot! Opinions are like assholes -- everybody's got one.

P. S. Thanks for reading mine. :-)

 

I thought they were rated on how rare they are. My bad.