Fill me in....

Tickers are people who review everything in sight regardless of the size of the pour.

 

Yes. And it carries a connotation of being less interested in the beer at hand than in carving another notch on their tulip glass.

 

Go read the intro to scooping (the UK term for ticking) for more than you probably wanted to know about this. The tl;dr of it is, "A beer scooper will travel the country (and maybe the world!) trying to drink as many different beers as he/she can and, importantly, recording the details in some way."

The distaste/derision you sense comes from the folks who don't think 1-2oz samples are large enough to properly evaluate a beer, whereas a ticker would be more than happy to hit up the GABF and tick 100+ tiny samples in a 4 hour session.

 

A tick is simply another beer down, another added to the trophy list of hads. I'm a ticker but don't review EVERYTHING. For example, I have yet to review Cantillon Classic Gueuze even though I've had it several times.

 

A ticker is just someone who goes out of their way to try as many beers as possible and if they try it they call it a "tick" and my guess with the distaste part is because it seems tickers care more about saying they had X amount of beers instead of actually just enjoying a beer

 

There's a fun little movie called Beertickers: Beyond the Ale. You can watch it free on Hulu. ( http://www.hulu.com/search?query=Beertickers: Beyond the Ale&st=0&fs= ) It's a documentary about a group of tickers in Britain. They go along with one guy as he gets his (IIRC) 40,000th tick. The term "tick" seems to come from checking something off a list, tick it in other words.

 

Exactly! Like wine tasters who spit it out instead of drinking it. It's missing the whole point of the beverage.

 

Yeah I have been to a couple events/tastings where there is a dump bucket and I watch people take a couple ounce pour and take one sip then just dump the rest into the bucket. It is such a waste of great beer and it just blows my mind that people actually do it

 

A ticking mentality is to try and taste them all.

You can still love beer and be a ticker. You can still respect beer and be a ticker. You can buy a case of one kind of beer and still be a ticker. A ticker is someone who will order a beer they've never had over a beer they know they love.

 

Wine tasting pre-supposes that they are there just to taste the wine, not enjoy the activity of getting drunk. In fact, it is beneficial for wine tasters to spit out the wine. You are there to try MANY different wines, not enjoy a glass of wine. I can think of at least three reasons to spit out wine.

• The more wine you drink, the more clouded your perceptions therefore later wines aren't given due justice.
• If you are driving to an event, it is safer to not consume the alcohol in every single taste you get. Be safe, don't drink and drive please.
• You don't have to swallow the beverage to fully investigate it. Beer is different.

Shouldn't snub wine tasters just on the basis of spitting.

 

Be weary of those who tick.

www.ratebeer.com

 

Recently, there's been a new scientific focus on habit-formation and response-and-reward mechanisms in living things. Essentially, the mechanism is, the brain forms a habit by getting a cue of some sort (visual, procedural, etc...), which puts the body into a procedure dictated by neural pathways formed through experience of getting a certain reward, which is followed by the reward.

Many avid beer drinkers form a habit procedure around the reward of tasting something new or interesting or delicious. Some other avid beer drinkers form a habit procedure around the reward of marking things down as "experienced," to gain a large list. Obviously, there's bound to be more respect for the first response-reward (enjoying the beer itself) rather than the second (enjoying the "ticking" of a beer). But both are natural human reward mechanisms that manifest themselves in other places, and in many cases they can overlap. But for those few who do it almost solely for the ticking, people who are concerned with the taste of the beer will not respect them, perhaps rightfully so.

 

nickd717 used to provide some classic ticking stories. Drive-by ticks and the like.

 

Welcome to Rate Beer!

Cheers!

 

The only reason it pre-supposes that, is that somewhere in time people decided to do that instead of just enjoying drinking the wine. That is the same thing that is happening with craft beer now. You can have many mouthfuls of many wines or beers without getting drunk. I wasn't snubbing anybody, just stating that it defeats the original intent of either beverage. And that is to drink it.