Tasting beer is rarely a team effort but rather a very personal pursuit. The way you interpret all those beery aromas and flavours depends entirely on your own unique tasting DNA as well as a raft of other external factors that can easily turn a good beer into a drain-pour or into an drinking experience you’ll never forget.

With so many variables and fuzziness I’ve always been from the school of ”Don’t take My Word for It, Try it Yourself” and have treated rating systems with about the same amount of suspicion I feel whenever I see a pitbull terrier off a leash.

However I also understand that people generally like beer ratings as they bring a little order, tidy things up and potentially make the job of choosing which beers to buy a little more straight forward. That’s why I introduced a rating system to BeerSweden (after a few months of resistance) back in March of this year.

However I’ve discovered that this system, like my own ability to taste, isn’t perfect. I’ve increasingly found the scale of 1-5 with 0.5 increments is just too ‘clumsy’. There have been several beers I’ve rated, say, 4 because it was better than a 3.5 when it reality it wasn’t really a full 4 either.

Therefore from today I’m introducing a slightly more sophisticated scale of rating, using all the  .somethings from 0.0 to 4.9. I’ve also shamelessly stolen the idea of displaying these ratings on a bottle cap from the excellent Swedish beer blog Pilsner.nu which I recommend you all check out (and not just to make me feel better either. It’s a well written blog from a guy, Jonas, who is one of the original founders of Slottskällans Bryggeri and has 25 years in the beer business so really knows what he is talking about).

Remember though that rating a beer is like trying to describe toothache to someone else – sometimes it’s very hard to put into words. Therefore I still urge you all to go out and buy and try as many beers as possible (while drinking in moderation and responsibly of course) in order to make up your own minds.