Reviews without ratings?

If you enjoy writing reviews, why wouldn't you want to give it a rating?

 

Was it ever possible to leave a review for a beer without rating it? If it was is there a reason it changed?

Short answer: no

 

A desire to review w/o rating makes total sense to me. (But it being a positive or negative for BA is a totally different thing.)

For example, describing the color of a beer is a completely different thing than determining a numerical value to score appearance. This is from the most recent beer reviewed on BA:

To me, the above score and description are two totally different things. One is a description and the other is a value judgement. (But the two aren't always so distinct obviously.) Perhaps a reviewer wants to do one and not the other. For other reviewers, the two might go hand in hand.

I don't enter formal reviews in the BA database, so maybe my perspective isn't valuable... but I did enter a single review at one time and it's possible that my scoring technique was slightly telling.

@jonphisher

 

I always wrote honest reviews as a beer and wine marketer. I never once thought a numerical score would make any difference.

 

Outside of personal preference and theory of rating vs reviewing I can think of a practical scenario where you might want to review without a rating. If you know or strongly suspect a beer was infected, light-struck, oxidized, recalled, etc. at no fault of the brewer, but want to say something about the beer anyway or just get the tick, then you could leave a review without a rating that could unfairly impact the beer's overall score.

FWIW, Untappd let's you check in a beer and leave a comment without a rating. It's rare for users to do that, but if they do it's no big deal to overall system.

 

I feel like there's nothing really stopping one from rating-bombing a beer if they wished, aside from poor spam-protection or personal integrity. A good review means that you cared enough to tell others about it in a descriptive manner, and that you actually had the beer itself.

The real problem is people who aren't descriptive enough with reviews, imho. I'm not talking about people not being snobbish or overly-descriptive, more the people that give vague notes of something.

Instead of malty, why not bread-like, crusty, or cracker?
Instead of hoppy, why not earth, pine, or grapefruit?
Instead of citrus, why not grapefruit, orange, or lemon?

I feel like others leaving their reviews are incentives for me to try the beer, for better or for worse - out of curiosity. A numeric rating tells me nothing if you can't elaborate why it deserved that rating. If you're telling me a NEIPA has tropical fruit notes, what makes that different than other NEIPAs? Perhaps I want a NEIPA that specifically has tangerine peel notes, as opposed to pineapple notes - two completely different flavors, both arguably tropical.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic.

 

This is an interesting question.
I personally think that if you are qualified to leave a review, then you are qualified to leave a rating. Sure, many times I am unsure, or think I need a few more tries of the beer to give an accurate number. In that case I usually say in my review (Current Rating:...). I think that if you are giving a beer enough time and thought to write a review, I trust your numerical rating more than someone who simply had to click the boxes and not write a review. Maybe reviews without ratings could be a thing going forward. But I suspect most of the reviews without ratings would end up being from people like me that wrote and review and simply forgot the rating part. BeerAdvocate forcing me to give a rating is always a good reminder that I forgot to do so, but I do agree that a numerical rating is not always easy to decide.

 

I actually think it would be beneficial for some styles if the 1-5 scale wasn’t applied, and I think that’s partly because a lot of people have trouble rating to style. For example, maltier styles like brown ales or marzen rarely get high numerical scores yet if you read the reviews they tend to be pretty positive. But if you just looked at the numerical average for the top ranked beers of styles like these you’d almost have to wonder, “So, I guess no brewery makes a truly outstanding example of this style.” Which is simply untrue, and it shows in the actual written reviews.

I know some beers score well in these styles (though a lot of the time they’ll have adjuncts or be barrel aged rather than traditional examples), but it is proportionally much much lower than, say hoppier or high ABV styles where the top rankings are littered with “world class” ratings.

 

This ^^^

People forget to review objectively rather than subjectively. I feel like there'd be a lot more world-class brews out there if more people wrote objective reviews. I do understand the temptation to review them differently, though.

 

Good question that resonates with me, since I'm someone who just routinely ignored the numbers and cared only for the tasting notes. I suppose the fact it's so easy just to ignore the numbers, as I always did, might be the reason the idea of "review without rating" option never happened, but curious now to see if that's true.

 

You can make the same observation about "Places", where there could be factors that a simple rating does not account for.