Proposed Updates to Top Rated Beer Lists

I am not a Top 250 ticker and I am someone looking out for new local options that stand out, so these changes would certainly be welcome for me. I've mentioned this in the Top State Beers thread, but it's hard to discover new breweries (unless you just go to whatever is out there) since the lists are already congested or even dominated by established breweries. Hopefully, this evens the playing field a little and allows for someone who does something really well to breakthrough. Based off my criteria, I welcome these changes.

 

I like your ideas for the raw average plus listing only using active beers for the top rankings. The minimum rating, I can take that or leave it. I suppose it's worth trying out and seeing how it impacts ratings.

I imagine the beers of fame still will include retired beers, correct?

 

Per the 'active' - I'd say allow active & inactive to be apart of the lists. If anything, beers landing in 'inactive' can be more easily flagged by BA users to 'retire' them. Keeping this process manual means there could be some more evidence for when a beer is truly retired vs. simply not active on BA.

Personally, I'm less than thrilled with bumping the BA score threshold down to five, but ultimately, I think it's the right move. Even the more frequently rated/reviewed beers from breweries local to me are only hitting ≤ 8 ratings at best. That's after several re-releases.

It could create more of a mess than anything, but anyway to supplement beer listings under 10 ratings/reviews with an averaged Untappd score? Probably a PITA to link them all, with the different naming conventions and all that, but wanted to throw it out for consideration.

 

I’m a little concerned about a one-off that gets (only) five reviews getting an exaggerated placement in the top 250. 5 reviews at a popular a brewery is not a lot. In the long run, I don’t think this helps more obscure breweries get recognized.

 

Personally, from a conceptual standpoint, I think a minimum of 10 ratings for a beer to be on a communally created global top beers list is too low rather than too high. If 10 is too high from a practical standpoint, then I’d question the purpose of even having such a conceptually compromised consumer driven list.

 

Regarding the "active beers only" idea, I've run across several beers marked as retired that have apparently been pulled out of mothball status for re-release, the most recent being Listermann's Maple Chickow. How is retirement status currently determined, for beers that aren't one-offs but also aren't necessarily on a regular schedule?

 

Sadly... Welcome 250 kinds of Pastry Stouts.
My suggest - The beer with 5 ratings will be to able to include in BA rankings but not more one year. If the beer cannot collect more than 10 for year the beer will remove from any BA rankings.

 

Perhaps you should consider modifying this with the addition of “inactive.”

 

A little bit of a tangent here, but a long time ago there was discussion about some sort of 'handicap' factor to be applied to less popular styles that would help great beers in those styles reach the 'top' lists. Did that ever happen, or should it be part of the discussion in this thread?

 

While I understand the hesitation from some regarding lowering the necessary ratings to 5, this proposal might actually help get the Canadian list (as well as others I’d presume) move out of 2014.

Here, we suffer from too few users rating or reviewing beers. I’m not sure how that will ever change. We also see mediocre breweries that distribute to the US take far too many spots on the list. The breweries that most local beer drinkers would mention as being ‘among the best’ are almost completely absent from the list. I don’t know if the proposed changes will help make the list more reflective of the current beer scene here, but they might.

If you take one of the most popular styles, NEIPA, you’ll find next to none of the generally acknowledged best Canadian makers of the style on the list currently. Just from Ontario and Quebec alone, Messorem Bracitorium, Bas Canada, Wood Brothers, Badlands, Barncat, Third Moon should dominate the list. They don’t. This would be like Other Half, Tree House, Monkish etc., not making a top list in the US, because Celis or Pete’s Wicked Ale are still holding down spots.


One other thought. For the tickers, perhaps an annual archived Top 250 list would be a nice thing to have easy access to.

 

I can see it being a big can of worms to create factors to use, and you don't need that right now. Anyone who wants to see top beers in a particular style can go to the style page and find the top beers there.

 

It all makes sense to me in the ever changing landscape and revolving doors of beers. Especially in now times, as you mention, just the sheer number of new US breweries and offerings alone not to mention distribution issues/disruptions we sometimes face now. I embrace all 3 main points: Raw Average raking in all numerical ratings, the proposed "active only beers"(2 yrs is IMO a fair amt of time although some beers are very slowly rotational vs 'one off') which makes way for your 3rd point proposing a lower minimal number of ratings to 5 thus creating more area/visibility for new beers. Sensible changes Todd for Top Rated Beers. Cheers!

 

Yeah I feel like this is important. I see many local and smaller breweries in general who are just shy of that 10 review cutoff on some beers

I also agree with this. Wouldn't even be too hard to go back and archive previous years. Maybe when you navigate to the top 250 it defaults to the current year but there's a drop down box where you could check the year you want

 

And this little snippit is exactly why this change is warranted, give small brewers an opportunity to be discovered. Heck there were so many breweries right in my local area I was completely blind to until I became active on BA. And isn't that kinda the entire point?

 

My issue here - and I don't know if I've actually raised it before or only said it in my head - is that you have way more raters throwing up straight 5's than 1's. Using raw averages would seem to result in a higher average than might be otherwise be warranted.

Many times beers that were initially added to the database as one-offs are subsequently brewed again, as an anniversary beer, or go into rotation. Whenever I come across one of these - not infrequently - I submit an edit request but I notice that other reviewers have been adding reviews in the meantime. I assume that there are a fairly huge number of these that I haven't stumbled across. For this reason, whenever I add a beer to the database, I add it as a rotator pretty much regardless - I apologize if this is dickish.

100% yes. I often feel lonely and irrelevant drinking all these low-traffic northern New England and Québec beverages and crave validation.

 

Messing with the top 250 list really throws some people’s world in the chaos. How about expanding it to the top 500!?! … I bet that would get the trade forums moving!

 

I Like the proposed changes Todd.

Just a little confused because I thought only active beers appear in the top lists now as it is. Currently retired beers are not eligible anyway, so not sure how this is a change? What am I missing?

lowering the minimum number of ratings to 5 is a good idea, and it is not going to affect the Top 250. I don’t think people understand there is an “unknown weighted formula” Todd uses to get the rankings. Just because a new beer gets “5” perfect 100 scores, does not mean it’s instantly jumping into the top 10. It still is put through a weighted formula to get ranked.

 

I think the change from 10 to 5 is a good idea since it will open up people to more beers and breweries, just as Todd mentioned.

Often at times many of the inactive beers I find aren't inactive either, they just haven't been rated in a long time, so I just find them when I happen to review them and sent a note to the staff to un-retire the beer.

 

I don't know if it is already the case but my suggestion is to only consider beers that meet at least the minimum number of characters to be considered a review.

 

Ratings vs reviews are two different things. I believe all of these changes are directly related to ratings, not reviews

 

Can we please have a top 100 list for retired beers… or beers that are only brewed annually…

 

I had this issue last night. I went to a brewery out of town and entered a new beer. I had no idea if it was a one-off, rotator, or even a regular menu item. I just make my best guess.

 

Since likely most of the beers to which you refer are subregional, I don't see the value of featuring them on the top beer list if the intended purpose for doing so is to expose the beer to more people.

Perhaps dealing with this on a regional basis would better serve the purpose of exposing top beers to people who are actually in the position to drink them.

 

Please do this! I’ve wanted this for yonks but never actually mentioned it. The Irish top rated beers list is just ridiculously inaccurate, because the best stuff being made these days is never getting more than 10 reviews. This change would really help I suspect. Thank you.

 

I am generally in favor of your proposals, but like everyone here, wondering what the real results will be. Have you considered creating a sandbox version of this that you and maybe some moderators can review and look for unintended consequences before going live with it?