Figured this would entertain at least one person here, it’s definitely entertained my parents.
Backstory: I don’t really drink alcohol of any kind, not a fan of the taste. I expressed my mild frustration at lack of drink variety (i.e., water and tea) to my parents, and they suggested I try a couple different beers to see if there are any I liked.
I then escalated things as I normally do, which has resulted in a spreadsheet built over the course of several months. So if anyone here is interested in the in-depth beer opinions of someone who doesn’t like beer, this post is for you! I mostly just went to a local liquor store that let me build my own six pack and randomly grabbed stuff that looked interesting.
For reference, filtered tap water is probably a 70/100 for me.
I added the beer advocate rating just to see how my scores compared to beer nerds for fun. The subcategory column is sourced from BA, if anything is wrong there, blame them and not me. The main category is me though, if I screwed something up in that column I will take the blame. I don’t really understand the differences between types of beer, other than stouts/porters being generally decent.
I added the Alc/Vol column early on to see if there was any correlation to my scores, but in the end there wasn’t. It’s kind of unnecessary at this point, but I left it in for the hell of it.
Lastly, I say I don’t like beer, but honestly the top 3 or 4 I would call “good.” Not sure if I’d ever buy a 4/6 pack of them, but I enjoyed the singles. With that in mind, if someone has a recommendation for me, feel free to send it. Maybe I’ll expand my spreadsheet in the future, lmao
If you’re not a huge beer drinker, you should probably avoid giving much weight to the ratings on BeerAdvocate. I always treat those ratings with a huge grain of salt. They tend to rate “extreme” and/or hard to find beers much higher than I think they normally would be rated if people were doing a blind taste test.
Conversely, they also rate some of the more common or easy drinking beers – beers that are world class examples of their respective styles – much lower than deserved because they are not flavor explosions.
Finally, so many of those top rated beers on BeerAdvocate are going to be way to over the top for most people. E.g. I notice from your sheet that you have beers like KBS and Speedway Stout on there. If you have not already been drinking bourbon in your coffee before you began this journey, those are some heavy hitters that take a lot of palette adjustment to be able to appreciate.
Yeah I’ve been careful to not give any thought to the BA rating, I only added that column last night, it hasn’t been something I’ve paid any attention to otherwise.
The KBS and Speedway Stouts were definitely too strong for me like you guessed. Might try them again much later down the line lol