Beer Rating Curiosity

The local chef is who educated me. He is known for this book.

 

Hmmm, which seems to lead us easily to the parallel suggestion that bourbon barrel aged beers and tequila aged beers should each have their own style.

 

And remember,in 'How to rate a beer' which is posted here on BA- 'Don't rate beer styles you don't like.' I think if more raters read this FIRST there would be a more 'even' rating among styles...I don't like sours so I wouldn't begin to write a unfavorable review.

 

Well, that depends. How many of those barrel-aged beers are from a brewer who, on their own website, declares their beers to be first and foremost "barrel-aged beers", and then offers a submenu for "varieties of barrel-aged beers"?

Aecht Schenklerla seems to do exactly that, but switching out barrel-aged for rauchbier.

 

I remember somebody making the same arguments before....
(yeah, it was me ). Although I wouldn't say 'style' but rather 'classification; and it is based on the already-established method of doing so in regards to smoked, spiced, or otherwise flavored beers.

 

Both are meat. Is it any different than saying a stout is better than a hefeweizen?

I will make it simpler. Is a good steak even better with habanero pepper sauce? The flavor would be bigger and bolder.

 

Wait, 5 is good rating?! I thought the rating system was similar to a golf score and the lower the number was better. I'd like to try and clarify that BCBS is really good and is much better than Camo High Gravity.

 

What really needs to happen for more accurate ratings is to weight the beer style with the reviewer and their preferences... Some type of complex algorithm I am sure, but there is probably a way to do it.

This way, if someone has 100 reviews they only had (4) stouts and rated them generally more poorly, the weight of their review would be minimal.

However is a reviewer has 100 reviews, 35 of which are stouts, their review is heavier weighted. This weighted review would not be user-chosen and is submitted with the review and used in the overall rating of the beer.

By doing this, those who only drink and love IPA's and give a stout a 2/5 merely because of preference, their opinion won't matter much at all. The more types of a style you drink, the more you can likely rate for that particular style and your opinion should matter more.

 

If you don't mind, I've included a quote from your review:

I get what you're saying, but with all due respect, I'm not sure why you'd approach it like this. @TongoRad beat me to what I was going to say. You're doing a disservice to the beer if you think it's fantastic but rate it a 2.5. I think you are putting too much weight on this one aspect. You aren't "forced" to rate it a certain way. If the style listing here changes, your review will not automatically change with it. This stuff really should not be seen as something so cut and dry. It never will be.

This is similar to the issues if barrel aged beers became a separate style here. Their marzen says "rauchbier" and "marzen" on the label but it's listed as a rauchbier. It could be listed as marzen. If you ordered a marzen at Schlenkerla, you'd get the marzen. If you ordered a rauchbier, you'd probably still get the marzen (flagship and all that ).

I always thought that, as @pagriley points out, the brewery does not consider it a "rauchbier" due to the wood/malt. The listing here probably reflects that. Perhaps one could think that Schlenkerla is being too conservative with the naming convention, but obviously they can make that call with a good degree of authority.

The brewery calls it a doppelbock. Here's the thing, you rated it according to "what a doppelbock should taste like." Is this something that pinpoint-able? Does Schlenkerla have any say in the matter of what a doppelbock should taste like?

I hope I'm not coming across as harsh in any way. I'm just trying to be conversational. Thank you for posting and giving us a concrete example of what is being discussed.

 

I try to be mindful of the style when rating, but many styles can arbitrary, so I am also rating based on my enjoyment of the beer as a stand-alone product. I think reviews are about striking a balance between being fair to the style, trying to evaluate the brewer's intent, and expressing your own personal opinion (which is going to be based on widely varying levels of familiarity and experience with the first two things ).

 

I agree with this, especially your note about styles being arbitrary. I've always been of the mind that beer exists on a continuum and shouldn't be pigeon-holed into styles other than to provide a very broad idea of what a consumer might expect upon drinking. Rating to style is a fruitless endeavor, because some "styles" are simply better and more preferable than others as a matter of fact, and beers that fall into those "style" categories SHOULD have higher ratings on the whole.

 

No worries, I'm not generally all that confrontational!

My short answer is because if we go too far down the rabbit hole of "meh, who cares what kind of beer it's called as long as you like it", then we may as well just have a category called "beer", and stop discussing which IPA tastes better or where to find more bieres de garde. It's the flipside of the argument drrth put forward above.

My slightly longer answer is that, for better or worse, we have some terminology as regards beer, and it has some degree of accepted meaning. If I opened something labeled as a doppelbock and got smacked in the face with a quadruple dose of Citra, Nelson, Simcoe, and Centennial, I'm not going to be particularly happy with whoever decided to put a hop-forward beer in a bottle with a malt-forward style label. Heck, I already have to tiptoe around any US beer labeled as a hefeweizen for this very reason, as was recently discussed in a different thread, since so many of them are pale wheat ales. Similarly, given how polarizing smoked beers seem to be, some people may utterly loathe them while loving a nice malty doppelbock, and if they don't happen to know what Schlenkerla means right out the gate...

My slightly more pedantic answer is because as stated above, the brewery itself for this one classifies it as a smoke beer first, and something else second. Lol.

 

As long as you understand that that concept has a sliding scale as well, depending on the group that's doing the rating.

 

I think it lends itself to a lot of the lower rated styles are also the styles that just happen to have a lot more middle of the road beers in that particular style. I like a good German or Czech Pils, but I find almost all the American Pils I have to be average at best. There is a lot less deviation to many of these beer styles and that makes many of them fall to the middle of the pack, especially when you get a truly good one.

I also think that judging strictly by style would make some amazing beers get very poor grades. A great tasting beer that is called a certain thing should technically be marked down for experimenting and coming up with new and different flavors, simply because it is not in style.

 

I believe the right habanero sauce could enhance a good steak, given the right preparation. But it's probably not ideal. I think you're focusing too much on taking the words "bigger and bolder" out of context and using hyperbole to disprove the point. I believe there was an implication that said flavors are not only big and bold, but also desirable/appealing.

 

Regardless of which side you stand on, imo, it is the diversity of the approaches taken that makes this rating system great. My purchasing habits, fairly or not, are directly tied to what the collective here thinks. If I'm looking to purchase a beer I haven't had before, I will look at a sampling of reviews, across the spectrum of good and bad, including whether a beer is true to style or not, and use all the information to help guide my purchase.

 

No. Here's an example. Budweiser has scores ranging from 1 to 5 on BA. If people were rating based solely on style, you could not legitimately give Budweiser a score of a 1 because it is in fact a good representation of the style. Based solely on style Budweiser's range of scores would probably be more like between a 3.5 and 5.

It's a good example of the style in almost everyone's opinion on here. It's also a subpar beer based on almost everyone's opinions on here. It has an average of 2.35 yet if all reviews were based on style it would be more like a 4.35.

I am aware that all pro beer judges do not judge all beers exactly the same , however, like I said there is much less variation in pro beer judge reviews than beer enthusiast reviews.

 

I was originally responding to the post below.

This is no different than objectively saying ideally prepared hot wings are better than ideally prepared sushi or ideally prepared steak. To steal the thoughts of another poster, would you compare cornbread to wheat bread or sourdough?

 

biggest take away from this thread is that someone thinks that Filet is definitely better than skirt steak.

 

Who are the pro beer judges that are being referred to?