That’s good info. I’ve been doing it wrong the whole time. Drinking beers full. I got to get out to more breweries and festivals.
I feel drinking just a couple sips is pointless, unless that is all you get in your pour. Part of liking beer for me is drinking beer actually. I always thought wine tastings where you spit out wine are pointless, and only taking a sip or two is just a step away from that. So how to stay in shape? Eat well and exercise as much as possible. Calories ingested v. Calories burnt is a numbers game.
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All the real experts have explained this quite well. But curious as to how this is really done, at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in 2015 I decided to see how many beers I could tick. After attending all four session lasting over 17 hours I sampled 550 new beers in three days. The operable word here is “sampled” because no matter how you approach this (flights, beer festivals, bottle sharing, etc) you drink small quantities. To put this in the GABF perspective, at 120 half ounce tastes (they only pour one ounce samples to begin with) this works out to only 60 ounces of beers in 4- 1/2 hours. That is just five 16 oz glass of beer and over that amount of time is not heavy drinking at all. But as was pointed out, at this point it is a numbers game, so that is not the only way I drink beer. A lot of my ratings are from visits to restaurants or bottles/cans purchased or received in trades where I usually drink the whole thing. I enjoy ticking but I also enjoy beer so I do both.
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So I started looking for a small core of folks to regularly do a quality tasting. I wish I wasn’t in a more populated area. There are only a couple of folks who I know that would be serious about the endeavor.
@discobot fortune
Do you believe there are people that can get 6 to 10 new beers to try every day?
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My reply is no
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Our lord has spoken.
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Yes I do believe. I can easily get 5-6 new beers per day— averaged out over time.
Yep, it’s pretty easy depending on where you live. I’m averaging 4 new beers a day at the moment, yeah it’s unhealthy but that’s a separate issue. And you know what, there’s a plethora of bottleshops all over Europe, a huge portion of them are online too, that’s how I’m racking up so many ratings.
A lot of people who have replied already mentioned the fact they travel and/or visit loads of festivals every year. I haven’t even started doing that yet! So you can see how it is actually pretty easy to accumulate huge amounts.
As for the debate on whether people are doing it simply for the numbers game or because they just love beer. You can get an idea by looking at their average score given or average beer rated. If it’s around 3 or below, there’s a good chance they don’t enjoy beer as much as you might imagine. Of course that is a generalisation and not a rule, it could be that they are extremely overcritical of what they rate.
Or maybe I’m the odd one in that I only seek out great beers and avoid stuff with a low score. So you see there’s too many variables to this, everyone has different tastes, everyone has their own way of rating. It’s not black and white.
I actually view the midpoint as somewhat below 3 so, for me, a beer scoring 3.0 might not be packed with excitement but I’d regard it as quite decent and, generally, I’d be perfectly happy to drink it again.
Since the lowest score we can give is 0.5 and the highest is 5.0 (leading to 2.75 as the midpoint), I generally view 2.8 as what an average beer would score.
This differs from user to user. I consider 3.1/3.2-3.4 as average or decent beer. 3.5-3.6 is good. 3.7 is on the borderline between good/very good and also borderline for the beer I’d like to have again.
First few months of Ratebeer was kinda weird, hadn’t had enough of a range of styles to fully appreciate and know how to rate. Mine is something like this now, not perfect by any means but it’s how mine have ended up.
0.5-1.5 = awful, would not drink again, I’ve drainpoured anything in this range
1.6-2.0 = bad, dull
2.1-2.9 = ok, drinkable, but not something I’d buy again. Anything towards the higher end of this range I consider straddling the average/good line, depending on style*
3.0-3.4 = good, but not great. I enjoyed this but for whatever reason it didn’t come together as well as I’d have liked.
3.5-4.0 = good to great, enjoyed drinking it. While I’d rather try something new I’d generally be happy to drink this again
4.0-5.0 - Outstanding. Beers I consider to be excellent and that I personally very much enjoyed drinking and would happily drink again. For a perfect 5 it has to be a beer that I felt could not be improved in any way
Seems like most beers I rate these days are around the 3.5+ mark, I’m intentionally avoiding lower rated stuff, I’d rather drink beers I’m more likely to enjoy.
* I mention style here because it plays a part for me. My favourite style is IPA and I probably rate these slightly higher than I should, simply because I enjoy drinking them so much. So if I give one a 3.0 then it means I wasn’t impressed with it at all, even though it was perfectly drinkable.
On the other hand, my least favourite style is pale lager, most of these I rate less than 2.5 because I find them so dull and boring usually. So if I rated a lager a 3.0 then it means I actually quite enjoyed it. Despite me giving it the same score as the IPA which I did not enjoy.
Is everyone else like that or I am weird?
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I second this scale. It is similar to mine. Once I get in the 2s something is wrong. Also the scale is not all the way from .5 to 5, given that so fee beers for me go beyond 4.2… beer before 1.5 must be truly vile, but I have gone down there and I assume I will again.
I think this rather depends on how much social drinking you do in non-specialist beer places. I do quite a lot of that. So, when I say 3.0 is a beer I’d be happy to drink again, it’s more along the lines of being content to hang out with friends & drink without trying to persuade them to move on elsewhere than drinking it when I’m on my own (unless, of course, I’ve not had it before).
Yeah that’s another great point actually. I’m far happier drinking a 3.0 when out with good company than if I were at home alone. In fact it’s because the vast majority of my drinking is solo at the moment that I purposely seek out better beers. I don’t think I’d enjoy beer as much otherwise.
It’s an interesting topic this.
Funnily enough I am drinking a Pilsener from Thurn und Taxis as I write this. I too find Pale Lagers/Helles/Pilseners, etc, etc. uninteresting and even though I have really enjoyed the Pilsener in question, it only just managed 3.1, so you’re not weird, join the club!
<*))))))><
Hoorah - the “average is in the right place” club is growing! It’s a shame we make up only 1% of the site 
While I agree that 2.8 is an okay beer with which nothing needs to be wrong, this is not necessarily true. For instance, 40% of the marks that can be given (namely the overall score) are correlated with other marks - and even more, this correlation is not uniform.
