Yeah they certainly aren’t independent. If you look at the rating distributions of a few of the old hands on the site you definitely see that beer ratings aren’t on a Gaussian curve, looks more like a malformed Poisson distribution in many cases. Wonder what that says about the randomness of the ratings 
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Maybe it’s just an indication that beers have improved over the years!
that range us about me as well
Recently I’ve been on the snobbier side, didn’t rate a beer a 5 last year at all. Used to give them out more, but I also had less experience. So far this year I’ve only gotten a 4.5 and that beer was amazing to me, so I see myself trending a little lower in the future.
Fingers crossed I don’t get this post removed.
“beers have improved over the years”, eh?
Let’s look at your top 50: https://www.ratebeer.com/user/1966/beer-ratings/1/4/
12 2006
4 2008
16 2009
5 2010
5 2011
3 2012
1 2015
3 2016
1 2017My average beer mark is 3. Strangely i try to drink as many beers that fall well below this as possible.
Think thats a flawed Metric.
A far more interesting one, is the Average Rating. vs Your average Rating.
in fact
Does “The Quality of the Beer you are drinking” mean “the quality of the beer you tick” or “the quality of the beer you chose to drink for pleasure”? Which also needs to be evaluated within the context of the question “are you discriminating in what you tick, or do you tick anything which stays still long enough?”
In the old days there were only 10 excellent beers available to me, now there are 40. But there used to be only 50 crappy beers, and now there are 300. Does that mean there’s better or worse beer nowadays?
A “how would you rate the state of your country’s beer scene a decade ago” question would help provide some context.
Ahh see i dont care if there is a million Crappy beers out, there, If theres a market for them , Good for those producers. If their isnt the worst will die off.
But if the Number a Good/great/excellent beers has Quadruppled. Thats Awsome news.
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OK, so you’re cherry-picking the data you want in your statistical sample. Flawed methods have a tendency to lead to meaningless results.
No more so that you choosing only top 50
But maybe all beer hasnt improved.
But and maybe im wrong, but id suspect that most people only Care about the beer they are rating
Theres always been good and bad beer out there. But 10 years ago, i was rating more or less everything i could get my hands on, so drunk a lot of Meh beer.
Now i can rate twice maybe even three times as much and those im rating, are markedly better.
Personally ive not got any problems with people drinking what i would consider shitty beer, if thats what they enjoy… Hopefully more of this is small producers making money that Big global companies. But if they enjoy what their drinking who am i to complain.
All i care about is whhat im having, and for me thats shown a marked increase in Quality
“No more so that you choosing only top 50”
That was the only stat immediately available to me for arbitrary raters. (OK, that and the bottom page.)
Assuming a constant use of score over time (which is absolutely not the case in reality, I reckon I didn’t really settle down for 2-3 years), then an increased mean (better average quality of beer), identical variance (a null hypothesis), and equal sample size should yield an increasing number of high extremal data points, and a decreasing number of low extremal points too, hmm, let’s see…
Here’s @bhensonb’s bottom 50:
3 2006
15 2007
4 2008
4 2009
6 2010
2 2011
5 2012
4 2013
2 2014
2 2015
Is seems very likely that there was a year 2 “lets tick all the stuff!” streak.
But of course, all these stats are self-selected (by the rater) samples, and you can’t separate that aspect.
Maybe in the olden days before beer improved so much, the very few really great beers stood out head and shoulders above the crowd. Thus deserving of high ratings. So I posit that there are fewer really great beers these days, but a very huge number of very good beers.
As for: “Is seems very likely that there was a year 2 “lets tick all the stuff!” streak.”
2006 was actually year 6 for me, and until then I hadn’t really been paying much attention to the site. Then at Ledger’s Liquors Irish Boy “explained things to me”, and the remainder of 2006 saw every beer get rated, but not much of that year was left. The enthusiasm continued into 2007, and every crappy beer I could find got rated. However, in those old days there weren’t many new crappy beers available to me, so the numbers of crap declined later. Sometimes I reflect on where my total would be, if only I had rated all the beers I consumed from 2001 to 2005. But that might have resulted in fewer opportunities in later years. Great hobby, this.
Just took the rating increase decline survey (years before 2006 had virtually no ratings)
2016 3.79
2010 3.51
2007 3.21
2006 3.37
RE: beer quality – It is 10x easier to find awesome beer today compared to 10 years ago.
I don’t care what the ratings say or if there are also more bad beers or anything like that. Hell, I bet most of mt top 50 is also ratings that are 5 years old or more.
Anyone that thinks the craft beer climate was better 10 years ago is insane.
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Craft beer was so much better 10 years ago.
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I will fight you IRL
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I also bet if you had those beers for the first time now, they would still score highly.
Probably not nearly as highly as I originally rated them, but high… yes. Some of them, though, not so much. 90 min IPA? Sculpin? These wouldn’t make my top 500 IPAs these days, yet there they are sitting with scores above 4.0.
I think it’s also worth noting that back then those were the gold in a sea of shit. Many of these beers are still good today, but there are a lot more also good beers around them. Now instead of a few nuggets of gold in the sea of shit, we have a virtual oasis, to the point where it’s pretty easy to ignore all the shit if you want to and have a seemingly never ending supply of new great beer.
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This is not just 100% believable, it’s my conclusion too.
But in some ways I miss the days when I’d just go to the mediocre-on-the-world-scene-but-locally-very-decent pub and crack open a 75 of some widely-distributed quality Belgian Dubbel. Having said that, even with the frantic ticking crowd here, we still have time to kick back and just drink an old favourite occasionally (Cantillon 1900 BGC FTW).
