Also, countries that I have more than 50 ticks from but still manage an average of less than 3. Seems to be mostly a lot of countries with a young but growing brew base. Caveat in all this is I tend to rate low:
Iceland (56) 2.98
Costa Rica (69) 2.64
Poland (72) 2.74
Spain (75) 2.89
India (88) 2.73
Colombia (94) 2.73
Argentina (98) 2.8
Gold: Albania 17 rates - 1.86
Silver: Faroe Islands 28 rates - 2.33 - huge surprise!
Bronze: Montenegro 10 rates - 2.4
(edging out Lithuania at 2.41 on 16 rates and Mexico at 2.45, also on 16 rates)
Hardcore 100+ version:
Gold: Hungary 400 rates - 2.7
Silver: France 203 rates - 2.75
Bronze: Finland 148 rates - 2.84
(edging out Germany at 2.85 on 1168 ratings and Bosnia and Herzegovina at 2.87 for 106 ratings)
I owe Hungary, France and Finland a revisit since I visited all multiple times, but not in a while. The scenes in all three are much better now! Even Montenegro - which grew a craft beer scene maybe a year or two after my only, short visit.
I suspect this is often a reflection of your local import market. We get enough of these to get over the 10 rates criteria, but it’s still mostly the macro beers from those countries being exported.
|Austria|17|2.82|
|Australia|14|2.71|
|Mexico|15| 2.38|
If I raise the criteria to 50 ratings, the average goes up likely reflecting the fact that we get both great beers and crappy beers from Germany, for example.
France 83 3.03
Netherlands 59 3.1
Germany 144 3.11
I only have two countries with an average over 3.5! This is largely due to a few prolific craft brewers that export to North America (Nogne, Mikkeller, Amager, To Ol, etc.) and not a lot of macro beers that make it here. I also haven’t really had a beer from either country recently. They don’t come to Canada as much anymore, and I haven’t been to the US since 2016.
Norway 27 3.74
Denmark 144 3.52
I’m curious to graph my Canadian average - I suspect it’s slowly creeping up as in the last few years I tend to tick for the sake of ticking a lot less, and the proliferation of breweries means its easy to scratch the ticking itch just with breweries known to be better. Trying to tick all the new breweries is likely the downfall of that lol
I’m getting kind of like this too. I’ve stopped actively going after styles I don’t like and breweries I know are crap. Trouble is I’ll give new breweries the benefit of the doubt–at least 5 ticks or so or a brewpub visit before I start avoiding them
