My last 44 beers ratings have been between 3.1 and 3.7.
Thing is, i know how to avoid shit beer theae days. I know to avoid pubs and brweries and styles that will be fraught with difficulty, quality-wise. So fewer golden ales from down the Spoons and random shit pubs for me. Also, while Leicester is the butthole of the East Midlands beer wise, it still benefits from the general awesomeness of the Midlands beer scene(s). So no longer living in Christ-help-us Bedford or Greene-king-itis Cambridge has made my lower lates decrease significantly. But that doesn’t explain why so little excites me enough to climb to the upper eschelon of 4+…
What do you all do when you may be in a rut? Take a break? Spend time in some Marston’s pubs? Concentrate on country ticks where horribleness may remind you how bad beer can truly be?
I am fed up with citrus flavoured golden brews and cloudy shit. I want my beers to look and taste like beer should, not taste like Toilet Duck or look like Ribena with floating lumps of Peanut Butter suspended within.
Luckily Shropshire has enough ‘normal’ beer to keep me happy.
I tend to avoid sweet belgian crap and twiggy bitters
Quick check says there are hundreds of thousands of beers that avoid your hate list
So much beer out there
Learn not to tick stuff for ticks/stats sake
#NOTrocketscience
If only there was a website where you could check the style of a beer first, and possibly user comments, and help to determine whether it was for you or not ?
Hmm, but you don’t know you don’t like them til you tick, erm try them. Having said that, given a choice of 10 beers, I’m gonna try the styles I know I like (unless of course it’s a new style for me, and my brain can’t refuse it!)
I have always been a rater that skews lower. My baseline is 7/3/7/3/14 - 3.4 and I move up from there.
I feel like what it takes to move me from a 7 to an 8 or 9 has actually increased (aka. I am getting jaded / It’s rare to find something new and interesting that stirs me from that base these days.)
I tend not to use the full range of aroma and appearance. It takes a lot to get a 5 for appearance for me, and I tend to only give 5s for palate to very full bodied beers. Which may or may not be fair / make sense.
I think my tastes have actually changed over time. I appreciate well made subtle beers a lot more than I used to - but as an example the pilsner I would have given a 3.3 years are still probably only getting 3.7-4.0 from me. (But i would argue that that’s a good score from me…)
I am super sensitive to green vegetation flavours in hazy IPAs and it seems like many / most have too much of this for me. The haze and greenery detracts from the fruit characters for me, so hazy IPAs seem to get increasing bad for me rather than better. Similarly most adjunct stouts are hot messes. If I can describe your beer as gritty in palate GTFO.
Breweries hardly every make the beers i used to score highly any more - Big fruit hoppy IPAs minus the harsh veg, big robust and subtle imperial stouts that get 5s for appearance and mouthfeel.
Habit. I recognize that if I were to go through all of my ratings and bell curve them I would get results that probably better fit where I think they should be, but the way my scoring works I end up being stingy on the good beers and arguably too generous for crappy ones. I could try and re-calibrate my brain and change it moving forward (which has it’s own challenges) but it also irks me that in a way that would mean my new ratings are then less directly comparable to older ones.
Also when I am out these days I am far more likely to tick one or two new things then just enjoy a pint of something I have had before and know I will enjoy.
It’s tricky to nail this, mainly down to the fact that everyone’s situation (& taste buds) are different.
I drink in pubs/bars quite regularly, but I drink at home too. I have a large stash that I am trying to diminish. If I’ve been out for a day and had a few beers that have mostly been mundane I know that I can pick a beer from the stash that I will most likely enjoy/warrant a decent score.
I do go for style / county / country ticks that might be utter garbage but I’ll try them anyway.
I’m a sucker for NZ hopped beers, I probably rate them higher than most other folk.
I can’t rate every beer I try because I’ll never have enough time to do so. I started Untappd quite a while before RB and I’ll never catch up, so I tend to rate beers that I’ve enjoyed, or ones that will get me onto lists.
I’d say that (generally) some styles I’ll almost never give high scores to, because I rarely if ever come across a ‘wow’ beer in that style.
Theres a lot of mediocre beer out there. I think it’s only when you try the standout breweries or styles, excellent haze from New England for example or fantastic mixed ferm that you realise the difference.
Was introduced to Braybrooke lager by a friend last year and the difference in quality is hugely noticeable. Most other lagers I try don’t come close, even many German.
So it could be a jaded palate, or that many beers just don’t hit the high notes you’ve experienced before.
Ill add that it’s no secret production costs have skyrocketed, so expect to see more cheaply made volume-shifters on tap-lists and supermarket shelves.
I do find I get bored of sryles. I.e. 99£ of beers being NEIPAs/NEPAs that all merge into one when you’ve had a few.
Also found that I am drinking less at home. Will open a beer and still not have finished it an hour later. But that is as much anout being busy at work and non-beer factors as opposed to being jades with beer. Drinking in pubs/bars lift things up a notch.
Exactly this, and this is what I did in 2016 - gave up drinking beers just because they were new. Ironically with the explosion of new breweries and expansion of craft I probably drink more now than then even sticking to styles I like. Good job I’m not arsed about NEIPA/haze (#makeIPAbitteragain) or I wouldn’t know where to start… but I’m not so I don’t often bother drinking them
Yes, theres a lot of hazy pales that hit me as a 3.5 or 3.6 but they dont give me that high i used to get. I just got a box of Polly’s and while there are some standouts, they kind of blend together for me.
I recently had a Nelson-forward cask pale from Shiny at 4.1%. Simple but so, so good. Gave it a 4.2 which wss an underrate if anything. Mind you i think beer tastes better in the pub!
Looking at others ratings I’ve seen this a lot. Rating a beer 4+ seems a like a rare occurrence which happens couple of times a year. Like you said 90 something % rates seems to be between 3.x and 3.x. Probably combo of most beers being in that range and what jercraigs said
That being said the beer market itself isn’t helping much. Overproduction of several styles, most of stuff being Hazy IPA, pastry sour, imperial stout. Putting out thousands of Hazy IPAs when there isn’t a single brewery in Europe which can make it top notch. We’re part of that problem because drinking anything just for sake of rating is well, pointless.
