How we rank breweries

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.

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, the rest less often — and the site rebuilds weekly.

Something look wrong? Email support@finding.beer — corrections to Finding Beer are welcome.