# How we rank breweries
> The method behind Finding Beer's brewery rankings: how a brewery's score is calculated, why the quality scale skips 2, and what the ratings thresholds are.
*Canonical page: *
Every one of the 30,552 breweries on this site gets a single score out of 5, and a quality grade derived from it. Here is what goes into both.
## The score starts with the beer, not the venue
Most brewery ratings are really venue ratings — they measure the taproom, the service, the patio. We care about a narrower question: is the beer good?
So the score is built primarily from the ratings of a brewery's *individual beers*, blended with the brewery's own overall rating. The beer ratings are weighted several times more heavily than the venue rating. A brewery with a beautiful patio and mediocre beer scores like mediocre beer.
Breweries with very few ratings are the exception: below a couple hundred ratings there is not enough signal in the individual beers, so the overall rating carries the score on its own.
## Then it corrects for what they brew
Raw beer ratings are not comparable across styles. Drinkers systematically rate imperial stouts and hazy IPAs higher than pale lagers and wheat beers — not because those beers are better made, but because the styles attract enthusiasts and the scales drift.
A brewery whose lineup is almost entirely high-scoring styles therefore gets a small downward correction at the top of the range, and a brewery doing difficult, unglamorous styles well gets a small lift. The effect is deliberately modest — a percent or two — and it only applies to breweries already scoring highly, where the style bias is strongest.
## And for consistency across the range
A brewery with forty beers where six are extraordinary and the rest are ordinary is a different proposition from one where every beer is very good. We look at how a brewery's beers are distributed across quality bands and adjust the score up for a deep run of excellent beers, down for a long tail of weak ones.
## The grade needs evidence, not just a high score
The score becomes a grade, and a brewery cannot reach the top grades on score alone — it also has to clear a ratings-volume bar. A 4.3 average across eighty ratings is not the same claim as a 4.3 across eighty thousand.
Those bars are lower outside the United States. American breweries accumulate ratings at a rate that breweries in most of the world never will, and applying a US threshold globally would mean almost no brewery outside North America could ever be graded Exceptional. That is a statement about app adoption, not beer.
| Grade | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Exceptional 😍 | 6 | A short list of extraordinary breweries worth planning a trip around. |
| Great 😀 | 5 | Consistently produce world-class beer. |
| Fine 🙂 | 4 | Make genuinely good beer, if not the pint you will still be talking about next year. |
| Poor 😐 | 3 | Not bad beer so much as unremarkable beer. |
| Limited 😕 | 1 | Most craft beer drinkers pass these by. |
## Why there is no 2
The scale runs 1, 3, 4, 5, 6. The missing 2 is real: internally it means "not enough evidence to place this brewery". Rather than publish a grade we do not believe, those breweries are withheld from the site and the app entirely. So the gap is not a design quirk — it is the bucket you never see.
## How current is this?
Breweries are re-checked on a rolling schedule weighted by how good they are: the highest-rated every few days, mid-range breweries every few weeks, the long tail every couple of months. The site itself rebuilds weekly, and every page carries the date its data was last refreshed in the sitemap.
## What we do not do
- Breweries cannot pay to be listed, to rank higher, or to be removed.
- There is no editorial thumb on the scale — no hand-picked favourites.
- We do not rate taprooms, food, service or atmosphere. Plenty of great bars serve mediocre beer, and this site will tell you so.
## Where the data comes from
We aggregate from a range of public beer and brewery data sources rather than relying on any single one — community rating platforms, brewery and beer databases, and mapping providers for locations. Aggregating matters: any one source has its own regional gaps and its own crowd, and blending several of them evens out biases that would otherwise show up as a brewery looking better or worse than it is.
The scoring, the quality grades and the rankings are entirely ours. No source hands us a ranking; we build it, and any error in it is ours too.
## Questions
### How is a brewery scored?
Every brewery gets a single 0-5 score, blending how its individual beers rate with how the brewery itself rates, then adjusting for the mix of styles it brews and how consistent it is across its range.
### Why does the quality scale skip 2?
2 is an internal bucket meaning 'not enough evidence to say'. Breweries in it are withheld rather than published, so every brewery you see is rated 1, 3, 4, 5 or 6.
### Are these rankings paid or sponsored?
No. Breweries cannot pay to appear, to rank higher, or to be removed.
### How often are the rankings updated?
Continuously. Breweries are re-checked on a rolling schedule — the highest-rated every few days, mid-range breweries every few weeks, the rest every couple of months — and the site rebuilds weekly.
### Why is a brewery I know missing?
Usually because it is new. A brewery needs enough independent ratings behind it before we can score it honestly, and a brewery that opened this year rarely has them yet. It can also be that the public data we aggregate has not caught up with it — coverage is thinner in some countries than others. If a brewery has been open a while and still is not here, tell us at support@finding.beer.
### Why does one brewery have several pages?
Because it has several locations. A brewery with taprooms in three cities gets a page for each, since the address, the neighbours and the city ranking are different at each one. The score is a judgement about the beer, so it is identical across all of them, and every location links to the others.
### What if I think a score is wrong?
Email support@finding.beer. We cannot hand-edit a score — the whole point is that no one can, including us — but a score that is egregiously wrong usually means the underlying data is wrong, and that we can fix.
### What if the information on a page is wrong?
Send the details to support@finding.beer. Addresses, websites, closures and breweries listed twice are the common ones, and all of them are fixable.
### Are beer ratings ruining the brewing industry?
It is a fair concern. Crowd ratings drift toward hype styles, which leaves classic and technically demanding beer underappreciated. That is exactly why the score corrects for style mix: a brewery doing unglamorous styles well gets a lift, and a lineup that is nothing but high-scoring styles gets a small correction down. We are trying to surface breweries doing good work across the range, not the ones brewing whatever rates highest this year.
### Where does the data come from?
A range of public beer and brewery data sources — community rating platforms, brewery and beer databases, and mapping providers for locations — aggregated rather than taken from any single one, because every source has its own regional gaps and its own crowd. The scoring and the rankings themselves are entirely ours.
### Is there an app?
Yes. Finding Beer for iPhone is free, and it is the only place with the map: every brewery around you colour-coded by grade, sortable by distance, plus scores for the individual beers each one makes. This site publishes the rankings; the app is how you use them while you are out.
Corrections are welcome at support@finding.beer.
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Finding Beer scores breweries on the beer they brew rather than on the venue. Method: . Rankings by place: . The iPhone app adds a live map of what is around you: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/finding-beer/id1082135126