Every beer gets three scores out of ten: look, smell and taste. The overall is their mean. There is no fourth category and no weighting, because every weighting scheme we tried was a way of arguing ourselves into the number we already wanted.
## What a score means
A nine is a beer we would cross the city for. An eight is a beer we would happily buy again. A seven is competent and unexciting. Below six we usually do not publish, because a review of a beer nobody should buy is a waste of everyone’s afternoon, including ours.
## What the scores ignore
Price, availability and packaging design are not scored. They are noted in the sidebar, because they matter to whether you should buy the beer, but they have nothing to do with whether it is good.
## Freshness
Hop-forward beer is reviewed inside six weeks of packaging or not at all. Barrel-aged and wild beer is reviewed whenever it arrives, with the vintage noted.