Do you think most BAs rate beers too high?

Even if the BA scores are a bit high, it's nothing compared to the scare inflation on Ratebeer - I can't even take that site seriously anymore

 

Unfortunately no Surly or New Glarus here in NY

 

One man's 100 is another man's 70. There is no definitive "better", just opinion of one vs. opinion of all others.

 

I've rated to a 3.0 average since day 1, and my rdev is usually negative. I'm led to believe that yes indeed - most members of Beeradvocate do rate too high.

 

That's within the average deviation that I made up, so we're all good.

 

Just because an "average" beer is supposed to be rated at ~3 doesn't mean that the average rating for a person reviewing beers should be 3. I for one mostly buy higher rated beers because I don't want to waste my time and money on "average" or lesser beer. Therefore my average rating will be much higher than 3, but that doesn't affect what an "average" beer is rated by me. I do have some beers around 3 and below, but I generally don't drink mediocre beer. If we went by the logic presented in your post then someone who say only drinks Founders/HF/Stone etc. should have an average beer rating of 3, even though it's obvious that the average beer from these breweries is quite a bit higher than "average"!

 

Unless you generally drink average beer your mean rating should be higher than 3.0. By rating to a mean of 3.0 you are saying that most craft beer isn't actually much better than the junk put out there by BMC, when in actuality it is significantly better. Most craft brewers will not put out many products of "average" quality because if they did they would not sell anything, and hence go out of business. The only way craft breweries can stay in business is by putting forth an above average product in order to justify the higher cost.

 

It doesn't really matter. The rating, or score is an aggregate of all individual ratings. In theory, if one user tends to rate low, and another tends to rate equally high then the average of the two is the true rating.

One would tend to think with the number of raters there are on this site (low raters, and high raters, that the score truly does "average" out.

 

You clearly did not understand what I was saying.

What you described yourself as doing (mostly reviewing highly rated beers) does not fall under "rating to a higher average than 3." It simply falls under "having a higher average rating than 3." You do rate to a 3 average, but simply only rate beers that rate high within that standard. What I'm talking about is people rating to a higher average, so that even mediocre beers are rated higher than 3.

When I say "People seem to rate to a 3.6 average," I'm not saying that the average beer reviewed is 3.6 - I'm saying that people take 3.6 as a score fit for an average beer.

 

My appologies, I see what you meant now. Cheers! =)

 

I was also going by Etan's explanation of "average." My mean (for clarity: the average of all my reviews) is above a 3, or at least it was 3.01 and creeping up back when stats were available. I imagine my mean is something like a 3.2 now.

But when a beer is average, I give it an average rating.

 

Initially I rated everything in "Duvel-units" - that is, relative to my idea of a perfect 5.

Now I use a calculator and independently rate each feature (appearance, smell, taste, mouthfeel, and overall) of my "hads" for a more accurate average rating. Plus I tried Trappistes Rochefort 10, which re-set the "perfect" bar.

 

RateBeer is too high, not trashing them, but everything is in the high 90's

 

Are there 50 non-retired beers with a 0 rating? (Answer: No. In fact, the lowest "BA Score" is a 44, although it's a little unclear what these 0-100 numbers mean given that said beer has a 1.66 on the 1-5 scale.)

The Bottom of the List is instructive here. It ranges from a weighted average of 1.74 to 2.45. That's right, out of tens of thousands of beers currently available, only 100 of them are below a 2.45. I think that's answers the original question pretty definitively in the affirmative.

 

Numbers are meaningless with out words to back them up. If you want to be concerned about ratings be concerned with the number of poorly written reviews out there, not the score.

 

We rate to a solid 3.0 average, but most of our ratings are definitely at or above that level. When looking objectively at style, and at brewer's intentions, it's hard to find a straight-up below average beer.

 

FTFY

 

The purpose of the rating system is not to compare one beer to another before awarding points. It's to rate the beer individually, and then compare that beer's score to other beers. IMHO, you should be considering tasting notes as it compares to the style, not a specific beer.

 

When we're chopping the numbers and speaking literally to the word, you are correct. I'm just saying that in my travels, a lot of the beers we tend to try and rate are seemingly above average, and fewer fall below average. Perhaps we just stick more to the top half of the scale.