State of the Blog: Ratings Revised, Part I

It's hard being a blogger, writing out my opinions on beer. Wait...no, it isn't. Basically, I drink beer, and then fart around about what I like about it. Dammit, if only I was getting paid. 

I've reached a weird crossroad in my beer-drinking career. I want to keep reviewing and drinking beer, but I want to focus on what really matters. The Review. The review mainly consists of the words, and not the score that I tack on at the end of it. When I started the blog, I came up with THIS SYSTEM to review beer. I still really like the five categories: Sewage, Below-Average, Average, Above-Average, and Divine Brew. But what's the point of the number/percentage scores? First off, the percentage scores are pretty arbitrary. And second, they make it a pain in the ass to score beers.

Percentages and numbers can "go suck an egg."

Let's look at my break-down of Imperial IPAs. Thus far I have reviewed six Imperial IPAs. We can notice some interesting trends: for example, they all have done fairly well (and this makes sense, and I'll get back to that in a minute). But my main concern is the ridiculous percentage scores that I've forced myself to use. For example, I rated the Green Flash Imperial IPA as an Above-Average beer at 89%. And then I rated Dogfish Head's 90 Minute IPA as an Above-Average beer at 84%. The fact is, these are both Above-Average beers. It seems kind of arbitrary and dumb to try to rank which beer is better.

More so...and this is another huge problem...the Green Flash Imperial IPA is a West Coast Imperial IPA. It has huge juicy hops, it is dank as hell, and it has a distinctly different profile than the 90 Minute. The 90 Minute IPA seems more like an "East Coast" IPA, with more subtle hop punch, and notes of booze and brandy. To objectively try to differentiate between these two beers is like comparing an apple to an orange. And I fucking hate apple and orange comparisons. 

Another example would be comparing Tripel Karmeliet to the Chimay White. These are both beers that I rated as "Divine Brew". Although I rated the Karmeliet at a 98% and the Chimay at 93%, who is to say that one is really better than the other? The Chimay is a malt bomb (apple), and the Karmeliet is this refined beer with huge grain profiles (orange). Even though they are both Tripels, they are dramatically different. 

And so, we now get to the next dilemma. I'm scrolling down the blog page, and seeing a lot of beers rated at Above-Average. There is probably some Selection Bias at play here, as I probably have a tendency to shop for good beer. At some point, I hope I will have had the opportunity to try all the really good beer, so then I can drink some crappy beer and get all nasty in my reviews. Until then.....

My last concern (I swear) has to relate to the incredibly vague style guidelines. The other night, I drank Founders' All Day IPA. It was a damn good beer, but I felt obligated to review it compared to other IPAs because it is labeled as a freakin' IPA. Honestly, the beer drank like a Pale Ale in a lot of ways, and I wanted to review it as such. The fact is, style guidelines are important, but they aren't dogma. As such, if I'm drinking a Porter that drinks like a strong Stout, or if I'm drinking an IPA that is like a Pale Ale, I'm going to make note of it in "The Review," and score it as such. 

I still am going to avoid Apples to Oranges comparisons. I hate that shit, and you should too. A Dry Stout can't compare fairly to an Imperial Stout. It just can't. Hell, if you just read this post, you see that I'm having a hard time reviewing Imperial IPAs and Tripels, because THERE IS VARIATION WITHIN THESE PRETTY CLEARLY DEFINED STYLES!!!!!!!! 

So with all that said....I now present my new review system in [Part 2] of this post.