Must say I have never heard of this before, over complicated, but fair enough and each to their own I suppose. That aside I now tend to ignore some raters on certain styles, i.e constantly giving 3.2 scores or something to great IPAs, I guess they don’t like the style, for me, if you don’t, then don’t bother to drink it.
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I’ve also noticed there are some users which tend to drink loads of certain style (hazy ipa) and bash them because they don’t like the style and all of those hazy ipas are same. Seems like masochism to me, but hey to each his own.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
I was at a well-respected brewpub recently, and every single IPA was cloudy. Of course I grabbed the sampler tray, rated them all, and hated them all, there were no decent IPAs to tick.
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Had Craig in mind when I was writing that, but I’m not surprised there are more like him 
There’s a silver lining to the murky grey cloud of NEIPAs - old-school west coast IPAs now taste more delicious than ever!
I am on RB and BA, not on untapped. The primary problem I have with the RB ratings is the fact that I have added dozens of beers here, and rated dozens more with minimal rankings. These beers default to a low 3 cumulative rating, even if one or several persons have rated the beer 4 +. On BA, the beer rating published is the average period, be it 1, 10, 100 or 1000 users. Here, all beers are listed in the low 3s without many ratings, hard to judge a range of beers from new brewers or local brewers with not many RB raters without clicking each and every beer to see additional details.The average should be the same for all beers, but I agree a minimal threshold of reviews should required for any Top XXX lists.
I find BA ratings useful overall and RB ratings useful for widely consumed beers. I only go to untapped if a local brewer or bar/store has their tap availability listed, never for ratings.
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I have to agree with you there, my god the west coast IPAs taste so good, when you find one, now they are rare amongst the plethora of sweet hazy beers. Just had the Bag Of Bones by Pohjala, reminded me of why I first started enjoying Craft beer.
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Ya. I understand to some extent, since there are so many of them around. I used to rate everything, but now I mostly stopped rating the styles I don’t like after I hit 50 of them. I figure that has given me more than enough of a large sample to be able to say ‘I didn’t just have bad luck and taste a few duds’
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Ya the original rational for this was from back in the time when people worried that brewers would artificially juke the stats by rating their own beers super high. Definitely happens, and continues to happen. Although to be fair, most of the time someone figures this out pretty quickly and reports them since we are all pretty keen to notice a juke stats beer. Given that, I’m not sure how important the bell curve algorithm we use is.
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When RB was in its darkest days with the site redo I gave BA a shot. In the process of converting my RB ratings, where I am somewhat the optimist, I found on BA I was a total pessimist. I tried to rework a number of ratings to be in line with BA’s reality but gave up. I was too steeped in the RateBeer tradition. Concerning my higher than average ratings for the beers I have tried, I attribute it to a couple of things: 1. Being relatively new to RB, I am trying as many of the more appreciated
beers as I can. 2. I have my particular likes in styles and tend to give those beers higher ratings.
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I agree there should be safeguards to prevent spiking unearned scores. Many beer scalpers in Chicago pump up scores on untapped to improve “trade” value. Hence I place no reliance on scores on that side, despite the fact the site in many cases has the highest numbers of users for beers, especially new releases / styles.
However, I believe the settings on this site go to far to the other extreme, and ultimately reduces input beyond the most popular beers. New users sign up, add or rate newer beers, note the rating is 3.1X regardless of their or several other poster ratings, and maybe they stop rating or move on to a board with more activity/ a board their input has more relevance and impact.
For long time / wide releases, I do like RBs ratings, and believe ratings here are more balanced/conservative than BA releases. Based on the limited number of posters (even in a large city like Chicago/my home), outside of broad releases there are only a few ratings and all beers, great and mediocre, end up with the same RB score (low 3s) in a search of brewer ratings. I believe the best course of action is to allow averages based on the average ratings provided, and to intercede in cases of obvious reported manipulation. This would encourage new users here, and also existing users to rate more beers, especially new offerings. l’m still relatively new here (less than 5 years), but this is my perspective. I still respect the site and continue to add ratings to both BA and RB, have different family and friends which use one or the other so I post ratings to both.
Thanks again and hope you are able to enjoy Churchkey. I just retired from work, and had to visit DC a few times a year. Churchkey was what made trips worthwhile, especially the 5 cask pours!
Cheers!!!
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Just for reference, my “respected brewpub” above was - shock horror - Pohjala! But by heck that Bag of Bones is good. I’ve had it in several different pubs - pints every time now, no point messing around, and bought a stash of bottles to filter into the “go to beers” part of my fridge one at a time (no gluttony here, never more than one of each great beer in an evening. Unless you’ve had one of each, in which case the replacement for the one you started on will be at a good drinking temperature now, won’t it?)
Cheers! Actually might stop by there later after getting my hair cut
Same situation here in Quebec, Canada…
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In Casper, very few have heard of RB or BA unless I mention them. Everyone I know, those who drink beer, knows UT. Ease of use of their app is to blame, for the most part. I joined in 2012 and “met” up with friends from both of the other sites. Good interactions for sure. Very few posts that I would consider actual reviews. Hopefully it will stay that way.
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Really it’s a pity. There used to be so many Quebec users
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I think there’s barely 5 to 10 regular users now here…I see it as my personal database 
(or should it be 
)
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Ya, kind of where I stand too. Too deep in the game to back out and switch ratings elsewhere
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I was visiting an area I wasn’t familiar with, and the local bar used Taphunter. I downloaded it so I could scan their tap list, and lo and behold, it uses RateBeer ratings. Does anyone know if there is a more developed relationship between RB and Taphunter? It would be a decent Untappd like interface with possible hooks into the RB ratings. Just wondering, as it would seem like there would be some great possibilities there.
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I guess what I’m saying is don’t go to head to head with Untappd, but leverage a similar established app that could…
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