Tyranny of the Tickers?

That’s true. I think Untappd could use Top by Style badge at the beer page.

Greg Koch told me he used to have account here as well as Jeppe.

Agreed. Wonder if the shift you’re mentioning can be linked to the age of untappd and RB users.

Also in the article it is mentioned that Pilsner Urquell has only 3.3. We’ll here it has 3.38. Can’t say I’m a regular drinker, but I don’t believe Pilsner produced and distributed on that scale deserves more.

Or bottle-shop owners checking in currently stocked beers with 4.5* ratings, tagging their shop, in the hope that folk will buy from them. It’s a kind of marketing i suppose, but a little disingenuous all the same

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Actually, to me there is no ‘accurate’ resource. Averages are pointless, even more so for extreme beers, and I didn’t like the percentile scores on RB either (all those 98s and 99s don’t mean anything to me). People score with different ideas (much more so on Untappd than on RB) and people have a different personal scoring scale. Seriously, people with 10k+ ratings giving loads of 3.0’s either have a shitty hobby or just hold different values to scores than I do (I always hope it’s the latter).

So how I have used RB and how I now used Untappd, if I want to have someone else’s opinion beforehand, is to get to know the scoring habits and like/dislikes of people on your friends list and read their individual ratings. Ratings without any description on Untappd are mostly ignored.

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So the fact that it’s still made in large quantities and lots of places around the world like to stock it is evidence that it deserves a mediocre score? (FWIW I gave it 3.8 and drink it at least once a month).

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IMHO pale lagers are not made for wide distribution at all. It’s a style which is best enjoyed on the spot in brewery taproom or very fresh in establishments which care about beer. This opinion is based on my experience with widely distributed lagers and trips to Franconia and Italy where I was lucky enough to enjoy some top notch lagers.

PU is distributed pretty much all over Europe. Probably rest of the world too. Those bottles have seen their share of sun, hot warehouses and parking lots. Just to be shelved for who knows how long. If you check Tasting Beer even Randy Mosher doesn’t recommends it under style although it’s mentioned in the style description. His comment is “newer management has taken away some of the funky complexity of PU and it’s getting harder to find a genuinely charming Czech Pilsner”.

Average rate of my 21 RB friends is 3.22. Avg rate of my 99 UT friends is 3.28.

This one still bothers me from time to time. Seems like some kind of beer masochism. Should be studied by shrinks.

The only wtf in the article is the brewery who decides collabs based on untappd score. Otherwise this is nothing new, any kind of rating site has these kind of issues and a lot of them are general problems with reviews and reviewers.

One of the things I would like to point out: none of the top untappd beers are easily available, some are very expensive and limited, and basically none of them is something you can “just buy” (Black Agnes being the exception, can be web ordered in EU, but will cost you 40+€ for small bottle).

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Yea. I’ve had PU that was 3.6ish in my book maybe 3.7ish on a stretch, I’ve had PU that was 2.6ish. Fresh (day 1, day 2 maybe) tank PU in places that keep it well is very nice stuff, but only the cellar version in proper shape deserves more on my scale. Not even the straight-up unfiltered Na Parkánu / Volba Sládků PU.

Svijanský Máz being under 3 is a shame for example, as it’s likely the best commonly available normally priced canned lager in Czechia (PU’s the most expensive macro lager) when in good shape, and can be gotten for next to nothing when on sales, but even I’ve had bottles of that in the past that were not even close so eh, I can see the low scores too and I’m not helping with a 3.2 score.

I just read this article, although I’ve never been on Untappd but after reading this, things IMO haven change in more than two years.