As noted in my profile, I would rather have 4 half pints of 4 different beers than 2 pints of the same. I cannot understand why some people drink the same beer week in week out, year after year when there is such a variety of different beers available. Either they are very unimaginative or have simply found what they like and are not interested in what else might be out there. Are their drinking habits not influenced by their mood, changing seasons, or even the time of day? I am afraid I am far too curious to stick to the beers I know and enjoy seeking out a decent beer list that changes regularly. If I visit the Thomas Tallis alehouse in Canterbury on a Friday I'm happy to drop by on Sunday afternoon to see what's changed over the weekend.
With this in mind I am happy to have found the Untappd app some years which allows me to check-in to record the beers I'm drinking, note the location, and add comments, possibly a photo, and a personal rating. This excellent app has being going over 10 years now so I'm a relative newbie having only got started with it in 2016. It is always a pleasure spending an idle 5 mins looking back over the beers I've encountered in recent years and a particular joy when the recorded location brings back happy memories. I guess from a brewer's point of view the app is extremely useful for getting feedback on their beers by looking at the average score from all drinkers and perhaps digging down into the comments. From the user point of view it is a useful indicator of what's popular when faced with an extensive selection of unfamiliar beers. However, a recent conversation in the pub with a fellow Untappd user indicates that people have quite different scoring systems when they record their beers and this suggests you shouldn't take average scores too seriously.
When you check-in a beer the Untappd app encourages you to give a rating between 0 and 5, rising incrementally by 0.25. For practical purposes all I really want to know when I consult my list of beers on the app is a) have I had this beer before, and b) was it good, bad, or indifferent? For this reason I tend to score the beers I drink on a limited scale of 3.75 (for satisfactory), 4.00 (good), and 4.25 (excellent). But my fellow drinker in the pub (probably more logically) uses the full range from 0 to 5. For him a 3.0 beer is satisfactory, an excellent beer is probably 4.5+, and a disappointing beer does well to score more than 1.0. If I give a beer 3.75 I''m not that bothered about drinking it again. For him a 3.75 beer is well above average. Does this matter? Well, statistically I guess the answer is yes as a result of no common criteria being applied here, but both beer drinkers are happy in the knowledge that we're recording and organising our beers. And for what it's worth my current average for all the beers I've recorded since 2016 is 3.87. On my system I'm a pretty happy drinker!
Here are a few of my 'best' beers:
- Three Blind Mice Brewery, Little Downham Cambridgeshire, Glucas Maximus IPA, 7.2%
- DEYA Brewing Co, Cheltenham, As I Walked Out One Spring Morning, NE DIPA, 8.0%
- FrauGruber Brewing, Gundelfingen a.d.Donau, Bavaria, Germany, Symphonic Distortion NE DIPA 8.2%
- Magnolia Brewing Co San Francisco, Proving Ground IPA, 7.0%
- BrewBoard Micro Brewery, Harston Cambridgeshire, Lakota APA, 5.1%
- Northern Monk / Verdant / DEYA / Cloudwater / Wylam collaboration, Hop City DDH IPA (2019), 7.0%
Like food, beer is a subjective pleasure, undoubtedly determined by the circumstances in which it is consumed. Looking back on the six beers above I am immediately transported back to holidays in Ljubljana and San Francisco (nos.3 & 4) and I vividly remember first encountering no.2 during Covid lockdown. The only disappointment is that the last three on the list are no longer in production. But that is one of the charms of the beer revolution. There will be others just as good to replace them.
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