The most important metric for any beer, obviously is sales: Ratings can tell that someone loved a beer, but they can't tell you whether they bought another one.
Nonetheless, Untappd remains the most influential platform for consumer beer reviews. And when drinkers see a beer’s aggregate score on Untappd, they see only the average bottle-cap score, between 0 and 5. Where the beer ranks among others in its style category isn’t clear—scoring in the high 3s should be impressive for a pale lager, for example, given how it stacks up against others of its type. Yet that would less impressive for a big-flavored imperial stout.
Here, we averaged the scores of the top 10 highest-scoring beers in several categories, to get a sense of how certain styles attract more effusive scores than others. All these scores, however, reflect beers in the top percentile of their style categories.