When reviewing beer, we start by looking the serving over for any useful information; bottles and cans should have some sort of bottle date whether it be bottled on or best before (those breweries that don’t have it need to start!). We also look for alcohol percentages, IBU listings, anything that might help us better understand the vessel’s contents.
Serving size is noted and the beer is poured into the appropriate Beer Clean glassware whether it be anything from a German lager into a pilsner glass or a Belgian tripel into a tulip glass. Bud Light deserves little more than a red plastic cup.
Appearance is admired, we take a few passing whiffs, then a deep whiff of the aroma (after all, smell makes up about 70% of what we perceive as taste), then sip the beer, exploring it’s flavors and mouthfeel. Lastly we judge the beer overall.
Our scoring system on BeerFM is a combination of numbers that gets far too complicated when you just want to have a beer, but the percentage breakdown goes something like this:
Appearance: 5%
Smell: 20%
Taste: 45%
Mouthfeel: 10%
Overall: 20%
The above scores are no longer individually listed in our reviews. In addition to the “out-of-100″ score, we add a word-based score, listed below, to give it a less nerdy feel, so you’ll find the final score below the beer review displayed like so:
Score: 70 / 100 - Average
World-class: Beers scoring between 100 and 95
Exceptional: 94 – 90
Very Good: 89 – 85
Good: 84 – 75
Average: 74 – 60
Poor: 59 – 40
Drain Pour: 39 – 20
The scale does not extend below 20 for obvious reasons. Such beers should not exist.
