Brewery’s worth visiting while on a trip that aren’t seemingly worth it by ratings

I’m entering my back-log of beers from Cape May Brewery in New Jersey. As I’m going through I’m browsing the brewery’s beer list and the ratings that are showing up are rather abysmal. The top rated beer has a 64 for overall. If I were travelling through and judging a place by their beer’s ratings then I wouldn’t stop here.

Fortunately I live close enough to stop by without much time wasted and I was definitely happy with my stop here. They put a lot of one-offs and they’re generally pretty darn good, but they don’t have enough rates to show up in the scores.

I know that when I was travelling I judged places by the overall scores shown on the brewery’s beer list and I’m now wondering what I’ve potentially missed.

Place ratings and beer ratings are very opinionated and subjective. Its best to always find out for yourself.

That’s for sure, but when travelling from NJ to Niagara Falls, for instance, time can become constrained so the best have to be chosen and sometimes it’s hard to make the right decision.

Originally posted by keanex
That’s for sure, but when travelling from NJ to Niagara Falls, for instance, time can become constrained so the best have to be chosen and sometimes it’s hard to make the right decision.

I will usually always visit a brewery/brewpub unless directly instructed not to do so as in the beer is complete garbage juice. I find brewpubs almost always have beergeek value, whereas poorly rated bars often do not (always at least some new beers to try, or beers at the source as opposed to bottled or far away, whereas a bar might have the same boring selection as the other bar right next to it, or just bottled stuff I’ve had 100 times already for example).

Quebec is littered with brewpubs that are worth checking out even though their beer is not off the charts and I try to do so as much as possible.

Part of the issue is the scoring formula. An out of the way brewpub with a rotating selection will rarely get an individual beer with enough ratings to make any kind of splash. You really need to rely on place ratings for this kind of thing.

When traveling to non beer places I often go to TripAdvisor.com and have noticed that New York and New Jersey people tend to rate places lower than most and also tend to leave harsh descriptions of where they visited. No idea why that is but it is an observation that seems to frequently be valid. Perhaps that is also true of beer raters.

Do the brokensail method. visit wherever you possibly can no matter the existing ratings as long as it’s a new tick.

In general, smaller brewery operations with low numbers of rates require a scan through to see if the beers are decently rated. I should definitely do this more when traveling, so thanks for making a point of this. Looking at place ratings should also be helpful, like blipp said.

Also, not sure how I feel about the generalization of NY/NJ people being harsh critics.

I usually create my own spreadsheets and click through to the beers to see what the averages are to see what people actually thought of them.