RELEVENCE: What Does It Mean?

Answering the title only - nothing I'm afraid

 

Those craft beers you listed are most definitely legitimate IMO - if you've had them, you'd likely agree - I don't know about people rating them highly just to fit in or sound wise (you could be right) - but I certainly found them to be worth the accolades they receive.

BTW, you listed two Founders Breakfast Stouts...

 

Founders breakfast stout at 4.52 is some egregious bullshit.

 

The main thing that most of the top beers have in common is a very bold and clear flavor profile that is typically easy to appreciate. I also think most are targeted at the typical BA user. Someone who has (probably recently) discovered craft beer and wants to try something that is bold and more flavorful than the usual macro or even conversion beer.
I think most of them are quite tasty and while sometimes a little overkill they're well made by long-time good breweries, too.
Perfect storm.
In the case of the adjunct lagers, I do think there is a bit of bias. I question how in the world someone can claim a beer like Miller High Life doesn't look as good as a beer like Heady Topper. Most macros look excactly like what a beer should look like. Bright, clean, effervescent, white head, etc.
Unless something has weird carbonation issues or is freakishly pale I just don't see how they can be rated poorly on appearance.

 

Do you honestly think anyone posts a rating or review "to boost their own reputation and deceive others into thinking they actually know what they're talking about"? I mean, I spend a lot of time on BA, and I haven't for one moment triangulated a person's opinion about a given topic with their ratings of various beers. I have come to trust certain people's beer reviews (but only if they actually review, and not if they just rate), but these are not the people who are following the crowd anyway.

 

Wow. Just wow.

 

I think this thread should be called "Hype VS. Scorn." People collectively hype beers thus influencing others to want to be impressed when drinking said beers. All it takes is for the beer to be very good and they taste it, are impressed, then they're automatically fueling the hype machine by giving it what is probably a somewhat inflated score. In the same aspect, craft drinkers can at times collectively scorn AALs and their lack of flavor and body therefore giving them an incredibly low score just because they aren't anywhere near as flavorful as the things they're used to drinking. What's interesting about what OP points out is the pDevs. I don't think it has to do with people trying to fit in, I think it has to do with how BAs score beers and what qualifies for them as a "bad" beer. A lot of people will just give a macro lager as low of a score as possible without the system detecting an outlier. But, if you're being objective and rating to style (meaning comparing AALs to AALs and not to other styles), you're going to give it a more fair score. It also has to do with what people think qualifies as a "good" beer. I myself tend to overscore beers. Literally 9/10 of my scores are above 3.5. There's a very minute margin of pDevs the higher the score of a beer gets. It's because everyone's just giving it 4's and up across the board without having the different categories be split up in wider denominations.

TL;dr People wanting to fit in aren't the reason for inflated/deflated scores. It's the wide variance between shit beer and good beer and people's even wider differences in their approach to scoring them.

 

I think there's probably some bias at least, but look at the crowd here. This is primarily a community of beer geeks who are interested in beer and beer culture. Not to lay a blanket statement, but im willing to bet the overwhelming majority of people who exclusively drink BMC adjuncts and the like purely for the sake of drinking it and/or getting drunk tend to not have much interest in beer culture, history, etc.

That said, adjunct macros are primarily geared towards an audience of people who don't really care about what they're drinking, and those products tend to reflect that. People who care about what they're drinking tend to expect more from it and rate it as such.

 

If there were a lot of standard deviation in those beers' ratings they couldn't mathematically be near the top.

A better comparison to BMC would be to find low rated craft and see if the pDev is much lower.

 

This question is impossible to answer, you're better off taking it at face value or disregarding ratings all together.

 

Nailed it. If I think a beer is one of the best I've ever had, you can be pretty sure I'm going to rate it between 4.6 and 5.0. If I hate it though? I don't know, 0.5? 1? 2.5? Could be anywhere. Basically if it's below 2.5, I hated it, but there's not much rhyme or reason to where it gets placed within that massive range.

 

I've been on this site because I thought it was a bunch of nerds, but it turns out the vast majority are just pretending to be nerds! Bastards!!

 

I like Budweiser and I don't care what others say.

 

I don't know, what does "relevance" mean. All ratings are subjective. However, having a high or low rating based upon thousands of people's impressions is more accurate IMO than one guy's impression in the grand scheme of things. If 5,000 people think one particular beer is great or mediocre based upon the rating criteria, it most likely is great or mediocre to the average person who rates beer on this craft beer-centric site. If there was a website where people rated BMC beers, the converse would probably be true based upon that website's target audience. In the end, it only matters what you think the beer is all about since you are the one paying for it and drinking it for your pleasure.

 

It reminds me of my Walker Hound. He'll walk outside, howl and announce his presence, and really search for a reason for doing so. Sometimes it's a trash can that wasn't there in the morning, or a different car parked on the street. The boy is super alert!

 

With those AALs you listed, my guess as to why the rDev is so large is that many people throw a cursory "1/5" rating at them to prove a point that they're shitty without giving much analysis.

The inverse may be true with people giving higher ranked beers 5/5, but it wouldn't affect the rDev as drastically because the rankings on this site are skewed to the right (high end).

 

If there are beer geeks out there inflating ratings to look cool, that's just sad.

 

That pretty much covers it.