Top Beers: Question about statistics / calculations

When I go to the top rated beers feature. Say I want to see the list of the top beers from "Alabama". When I scroll to the very bottom where it gives the understanding of the formula calculations it has "c" that says "the mean rating across the dataset". It gives a 3.89 mean rating there.


So my question is what is the Dataset? Is 3.89 the mean rating for all the beers rated from breweries in the state of Alabama? Is it only the mean for the top 40 beers listed above? Something else?

Just wondering what this "C" mean rating tells me as a user/reader. I noticed that number is different for different states, US, regions, countries etc.

Thanks in advance!

 

Thanks Todd. You can see under Beer Talk I started a post with a bunch of stats off this mean. I think this is sort of the "holy grail" out here on the web we have of tracking beer quality stats by state/region/country viewpoint. Of course still plenty of debate which makes it all fun on the forums, but its about the closest pure data info. IMO. Thanks again for clarifying!