Do you drink 'Outstanding' beers on average?

I consistently drink very good to outstanding beer overall. I think if 4/5 is your average across the board, you're living right. Life is to short to do otherwise

 

yep, my wallet hate me

 

My regulars are:

Anchorage - Arctic Saison
Prairie - Standard
Firestone Walker - PIVO Pils
Noble Ale Works - Pistol Whip'd Pils (and any of their IPAs I can find)
Stone - Enjoy By
Boon - Gueuze / Mariage Parfait
Great Divide - Yeti
AleSmith - Speedway Stout
Lagunitas - Sucks
Anchorage - Galaxy White IPA
Unibroue - La Fin du Monde
Stone - Go To IPA

I also always have a barrel aged stout/porter/barleywine lying around.

Most of the new stuff I get is pretty excellent these days. I'd say I try on average 5-8 new beers a week, either in bars or bottles. They are generally of a very high quality. Last week I tried El Segundo's Meyberry IPA, Alpine Nelson, Noble Ale Works Big Whig, Ballast Point Grunion, Agrestic by FW, Bourbon County, a stupendous sour by To Ol, a St. Lois Gueuze Fond de Tradition, Monkish Sunset Beer, Port Santa's Little Helper... another DIPA I can't remember, Lindemann's Faro, Logdson Saizoen Bretta, had a few Go To's, two Standards, an Grassroots Arctic... I knew about half of these, but that is a pretty average week for me.

So, I'd say I drink pretty outstanding beer all the time.

 

I consider every beer, sight unseen and flavor untasted, a 3. Average. If the various attributes are better than average, I go higher. The opposite is true, also. My ratings tend to hover between 3 and 4, mainly because I try to drink beer I suspect I will like.

 

wouldn't 2.5 be average, as it is half of 5? A basic C grade.

to be 3 is a C+ to me

 

I don't really don't drink a lot of beer, so I drink what I really like. I don't have much in the cabinet or fridge that probably much lower than 95 or so. When i see 90 ratings on new stuff I kinda shy away depending on the style, if I drank more beer maybe it would be a bit different, but I'm picky on what I buy.

 

If you look at my ratings then yes. I drink above average beer most of the time. I think that's more accurate. If 3 is the average beer, then all the fours and higher that I have had are testament to the idea that most craft beer is above average. I also think I tend to rate higher than some other folks.

 

I was being mostly facetious. Mostly.

I've been to Aus a few times, and I'd say their "BMC's" are probably a little better than ours here. I did find a few little microbreweries that were good. I didn't see much crazy hoppy or crazy stout type beers.

 

My take on it is that we can pretty much rely on the aggregate ratings so long as the number of them is fairly large. Those ratings put the beers into loosely defined categories (e.g., World Class, Outstanding, etc.). Now, within those categories the difference in overall score is often quite small and they don't really give us a whole lot of useful information about what the beer is like flavor wise. But that would also be true even if the ratings did fit a normal distribution with mean of 3.0. Look at it this way, in the grand scheme of things does it really matter if one World Class IPA has a slightly higher average score than another (e.g., rAvg of 4.27 vs rAvg of 4.26)???

So this is where the actual reviews come in handy. While numbers and categories may tell us that some beers are well liked (or not) they do not tell us why or what is worth enjoying about that particular beer, or, more importantly, if we personally will like that beer. (This would also be true whether the distribution is slid and skewed compared to a distribution that is normal and centered about a mean of 3.0.) That is where its time to turn to the reviews and reviewers that provide useful descriptions of what the beer was like. I've found a subset of reviewers who describe beers I've reviewed in much the same way I have when I reviewed that same beer. Then in looking at a beer that is new to me I turn to the reviews produced by those folks in making the decision to buy and try or not to buy. (For years this was a particularly important step since PA has a case law and most beer is sold by the case rather than one bottle at a time.) This has been particularly useful for when new breweries start distributing to PA. For example, we now get Boulevard and I bought an entire case of Tank 7 without having ever tried it and based on its over all high score along with the review comments made by a couple of trusted reviewers whose tastes seem similar to mine. That was, for me, a good choice. Love that beer.

So my bottom line is yes we can trust the ratings regardless of the range of scores whether it is skewed or not and that all beers in a particular equivalence class are worthy of considerations.

The caveat is that because of certain biases it only works withing a particular style and not across styles. For example, some styles tend to have lower averages in general than others so I pretty much ignore the top 250 list since it really only tells us what are the most popular beers not which beers might be among the "best in class." And since sometimes I want to drink a really good milk stout I look only at that list to pick one. When I want to drink a really good Pils beer I look only at that list to pick one, and so on.

 

I LOVE DATA!! I have to do this later.. I've been curious about my average rating.. I'm going to say.. 3.95, but I will check later. With an n of 1,131, I'll have a tidy p value.

 

On average? Certainly, Id say almost exclusively. Lifes too short

 

If you spend any amount of time researching beers and still end up only selecting average beers then you are clearly doing at least one thing wrong.

I don't spend a huge chunk of time (over the course of my time on BA) reading over thousands of posts and hundreds of reviews in order to buy mediocre beer (although sometimes an Untappd badge will persuade me to buy something that I otherwise wouldn't). I already drink beer. This site enables me to drink beer that is quite a bit better for a relatively small price increase. I'm not someone who believes that he must drop $10+ for a bomber to find outstanding beer. I am fortunate in this regard.

 

1is undrinkable. http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/13307/80045/?ba=Shroud0fdoom

 

Yeah, I mean everyone pretty much said it. With the exception of new local beers, which I feel obliged to try, I'm only shelling out my hard-earned cash for outstanding beer.

Some stats:

Of the 445 beers I've given full ratings to (includes some repeats), my average rating is 4.03.
Yikes, the average price I've paid for those beers (excluding trades) has been $8.91 or $0.55 per oz.

On the bright side, I've got 130 bottles at home that average (yikes) $13.06 per beer or $0.78 per oz.

 

I only slay waelz bro, my palate automatically rejects anything below a 98 and it goes straight into the drain.

 

I know that I overrate things a little (I too will rarely give a beer below a 4), but I also try to drink only the best stuff since my time/money is limited. I also tend to slightly underrate some of what are regarded as the "best" beers (Heady, KBS, Abyss, etc.), so I guess that balances things out a little.