I put the figures at the end of the article because I want to deemphasize the numerical ratings. The rationale for this is best explained by John David Stone in his article “Scales“. The gist of it is that aggregating ratings (such as on a site like RateBeer) commits a statistical fallacy when not everyone’s scales are the same and not everyone weighs each criterion equally. I would add that even a given person’s scales change over time. Thus I want to discourage such oversimplification.

This is why I introduced the thumbs up/thumbs down system. I feel this has significantly more use in giving a person an overall feel for the quality of the beer without attempting to represent it numerically. However, this is still quite inferior to the actual description of the beer. I suppose I hope that after reading my descriptions you would already have an idea of how I would place it on the thumb scale, and since those are color-coded, I figured you would be able to quickly find the relevant ratings.

If you look around at other beer blogs you will note that it is very rare to include any sort of rating. I believe this is because there is a widespread belief in the primacy of a textual description over a numerical one. However, to follow the example of Michael Jackson (the Beer Hunter) we try to find something good to say about every beer, and I agree this sometimes does not give a good picture of which beers are decent and which are great. That is why I have committed to posting ratings as well.

The reason I put them in rating order at the end is purely aesthetic. I decided I don’t like the jumbled up way it looks when the thumbs are out of order.

So for now I won’t be changing it. Fortunately I rarely write about more than two beers in a single post so you shouldn’t be inconvenienced too frequently.