Joe Tucker: The Quiet Kingmaker at Rate Beer

The Quiet Kingmaker | Dining | North Bay Bohemian 

A very interesting article about RateBeer and its creator, Joe Tucker, was published in the North Bay Bohemian, Dining section. Joe's a friendly geek with a passion for data and beer. Everybody in beer knows him, even though he actively avoids the spotlight. That's why it was good to see that some one (Kevin Weaver) in the Bay Area (San Francisco, not Chesapeake) finally pinned the man down for an interview.

Weaver discloses that he has served as a site Admin on RateBeer and has used RateBeer to publish his personal beer reviews and ratings. This insight as a customer, producer,

The Wisdom of Crowds vs The Cult of Personality

"Instead of beer scores being generated via a single person or a small panel of experts, the overall scores on RateBeer are calculated as an aggregate of user-submitted scores, giving an equal weighting to every person who submits a review..." 

This calls to mind one of my favorite books, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Joe Tucker would agree with Surowiecki's premise that "all of us are smarter than any one of us." Such egalitarianism is one of the reasons I love beer. Compare beer rating culture to that of wine. Wine ratings are heavily influenced by a few oenophiles (ahem, Robert Parker, cough cough).

Compares RateBeer to Beer Advocate (no mention of BeerPal)

"RateBeer is one of the two major collectors of online beer reviews, the other being Boston-based website BeerAdvocate.com. Anyone of legal drinking age may sign up for a free user account at either site and post his or her own reviews of, essentially, any commercial beers in existence. RateBeer has the larger of the two databases, with over 120,000 beer listings, an international ensemble of 75-plus regional beer experts charged with curating the site and, at latest count, over 3.5 million user-submitted beer reviews." 

Meanwhile, at BeerPal, there are currently 44,000 beers and 5,600 breweries from 179 countries with 136,800 reviews in the Beer Vault. We are smaller, but our discussion forum is much friendlier. We have a great mix of thought leadership and camaraderie. I have memberships at RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, but I hang out at BeerPal.



Compares RateBeer to Amazon and Yelp

"In 2010, a Scientific American article regarding online rating sites singled out RateBeer as its lone example of what's working well in distinguishing the good from the bad, while gently disparaging the built-in biases of websites like Amazon and Yelp." 

To me, as a data-oriented analyst and a free-thinking beer-lover, bias is a big deal. Even though RateBeer is notable among ratings websites for it's attempts to limit bias, there is no getting around the fact that beer ratings are not the average of truly independent observations. Each rater has access to the ratings that other raters have given as they rate.

I keep all my tasting notes and ratings on a spreadsheet. Which means i have scraps of paper and e-notes all over the place which I them have to enter into the spreadsheet. One day I will have a web-based database accessible from any location and with any device, and my labor will drop to nil. Meanwhile, at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that my reviews are independent.

Which means that the only bias in my ratings is my own preference for Russian Imperial Stouts, Baltic Porters, Belgian Quads, and Double IPAs. And the occasional weizen eisbock. Not to mention smoked doppelbocks....