Hi again, beer fans, and happy Friday! Come have a cold one with us!
Some of us here have been accused of being beer snobs; it may even be true :) But I can still call out over-the-top snobbishness.
Something called businessinsider.com has decided it needs to have opinions about beer. Esquimaux has decided those opinions need to be mocked. Under the foamy thing for more!
I first saw Business Insider a couple weeks ago when someone linked to this article: Beer Experts Say These Are The 20 Best Beers In The World. Making lists is about the laziest kind of journalism, and the more I read the less I liked it.
Two Stanford computer scientists ... released a paper earlier this year outlining how our tastes change as we consume more products and gain more expertise.
Their theory was the more experience we have, the more we will like certain products that are less accessible to beginners. "...for beers, wines, gourmet foods — or any products where users have acquired tastes: the ‘best’ products may not be the most ‘accessible.'"
[they] developed a model to help them separate the "expert" users from the "beginners" on a given review website... it takes into account the number of reviews a user has written, and how the user's ratings evolved compared to the rest of the "expert" community (those who have written more than 50 reviews).
...we asked them to share data for the highest-rated beers by experts on RateBeer, the largest beer-rating website, with more than three million beer reviews.
Trying to extract really useful information from the tons of data available on the web is a good CS project. But even the best algorithm is subject to the famous GIGO Law: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Given RateBeer reviews as input, IMO, they aren't identifying "experts", they're identifying beer snobs. Don't call this list "best beers", call it "hottest beers among trendoid beer snobs". These may all be great beers, but they add up to a weird list.
Or I thought it was weird until I saw this list recently: 24 American Microbreweries Every Beer Lover Should Know. Why should we know them?
We found the 24 coolest microbrewers making waves in the American craft beer industry
This recalibrated my "weird" meter and provided more evidence for my theory that craft brewing in America now is like the tech bubble circa '01; too much investment money chasing too few good ideas and good people. The initial concept of finding the "coolest" brewers convinced me that the writers are silly and shallow; reading the article made me think that several of these brewers are the same, and more concerned with marketing than making consistently great beer.
I have one Green Flash IPA left, I need to go get beer. What are you drinking? Is anyone brewing?