Beer Reviews Online: How Do You Rate?

Once I found I’d made the decision to begin truly tasting and sampling beers, the next thing that I had to decide was how and if to actually rate the beers I tried. I’ve refrained from giving full-fledged reviews of beers here at Beer Rant. Beer is an acquired taste in itself, and to attempt to rate the myriad styles of beers that are out there would really be far above my skill set. The simple aspects of setting and circumstance can make a beer taste great on one occasion and lousy on another. Here at Beer Rant, I’ve simply acknowledged those beers that I prefer, occasionally adding that I would or would not seek out a particular beer again. The beers I’ve found that I especially like, I’ve usually referred to in multiple posts.

This is not to say that I don’t rate beers, I do, but not here on my blog. Normally, after I’ve made a personal rating for a beer, I check out how it stacks up with other drinkers. I refer to the ratings on Beer Advocate and Rate Beer, and they’re perfectly fine, wonderful sites but good gravy their rating systems boggle the mind with percentages and point scales. Ugh. I just need some place to jot my notes, make my ratings based on a simple scoring range and hopefully network with other beer drinkers of a like mind.

For my purposes, I’ve found a great online beer group called Beer Reviews Online. Sure, the other beer rating and ranking sites on the web are great and each has merit, but so far, I’ve only joined Beer Reviews Online. Why? Mostly because BRO is a simple, straightforward site that doesn’t have a convoluted multi-facet, subset rating system. At BRO, beers are rated 0 to 10 with space for comments. That’s it. In addition to the ratings, there is a member’s forum for sharing commentary and good-natured banter. Members can also connect directly through their profile pages and I’ve wrangled a great Beer Trade with another member of Beer Reviews Online, which is reason enough to jump into the pool. And guess what? If you decide to re-rate a beer, you can go into your ratings and edit the rating to move it up or down on your scale. I think that’s a nod to the vagaries of setting and circumstance, for sure.

So far, membership at Beer Reviews Online is fairly small and seems to include a lot of regional members. I’m an interloper to some extent in that I don’t live in the area where most of the other members live, but I feel more than welcome there and I have no reason to believe that others who visit and join BRO wouldn’t feel just as welcome.