At tastings many times people refer to relevant beers as being in the ‘Ratebeer top 50’ and some beer shops choose to attach Ratebeer overall scores to price labels - which highlights the significance of the ‘league table’ and Ratebeer scores. Why isnt the link to the top 50 list a tab on the front page, to enable immediate access to those who might wonder “what is this top 50 best beers in the world list this person speaks of?”
To me it seems that RB is missing a trick not taking advantage of one of its biggest selling products.
Personally, I feel the Top 50 has got a bit stagnant in terms of “new beers”. A couple Polish beers popped up and have faded out…although a Polish Ice Quad remains. Bells BA Expo has jumped in. And, a Swedish stout is hovering sround 50.
A lot of beers seem entrenched in the top 50…and some are outdated beers that seemingly rely on early scores to keep their stronghold.
I think the Top 100 would showcase a bit more variety, outside of American Stouts with coffee.
Do you notice how almost every single beer in the Top 50 is an Imperial Stout? That’s why. I think it’s lost some of its prestige (for lack of a better word) in recent years because people (outside of the Ratebeer bubble) feel like we’re too heavily biased towards Imperial Stouts. And in a similar vein, Untappd is heavily biased towards Imperial IPAs. I’m not sure many people outside of these sites care about them as much as we’d like to think they do because they aren’t representative of everyone’s tastes.
I mean, if you showed our top 50 to some novice beer drinker they’d think all anyone cared about was high ABV stouts. This isn’t true at all, but it’s the impression it gives.
This is why I never go to look at the overall Top 50 lists, to be honest; the only reason that I have a lot of ratings of imperial styles is largely due to the fact that they’re difficult to avoid when you’re at a festival/tasting or out with other RB users. I rarely buy them on my own accord.
I only use this page to narrow down to lists that are more interesting to me: Top 50 in countries I’m seeking out; Top 50 under 7-8%; Top 50 by style and from a country.
Exactly what I do when searching for beers considered “top” of their class based on whatever criteria I choose. And Top 50 by style pages are fine because they’re only comparing against similar beers.
It’s just the overall Top 50 being so heavily skewed towards one particular style that makes it mostly useless. And that’s not something that can be fixed, it’s always going to reflect what the majority of the userbase prefers. BA and UT have the exact same problem on their sites too, although they’re more evenly split between Stout and IPA it’s still just 2 styles that are way overrepresented, more an indication of style preference and trends than an objective top 50 - which, when you think about it, is basically impossible to achieve when everyone’s tastes are subjective.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Beer Gods Top50 contains a Zwickel/Keller/Landbier.
That one just doesn’t have enough ratings yet to be on the overall Top50 (and will probably never get enough ratings to not have the statistical bias in there anymore).
Another stat I find extremely interesting is the Top50 list of beers from a group of styles according to the Top50 raters of that group of styles which have one of that group of styles as their favourite style, such as: https://www.ratebeer.com/Users/CompanyPilsneragin.asp
