Same. As a whole, the American craft beer drinkers are obsessed with really hoppy beers, which I hate. So the ratings are completely useless, because a beer I hate will be like a 4.5 while a beer I love will be a 3.3.
There's definitely an opportunity here for a better beer rating system. Get some equipment to analyze the chemical compounds of beers, automatically classify them and use it to recommend beers based on your personal flavor preferences.
Check out beergraphs.com, it has lots of different normalization lenses that might get you what you want. Founded by some baseball stathead writers, so takes a lot of the same approaches to data.
> As a whole, the American craft beer drinkers are obsessed with really hoppy beers, which I hate.
In standard American fashion, we are bad at subtlety. You want hops, we will make beer that tastes like you're chewing on raw hops. You want alcohol, the beer will taste like whiskey. While there are some exceptions (like Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA), this is the standard formula for American craft beers.
The Belgians on the other hand can really 'craft' beer.
There's definitely an opportunity here for a better beer rating system. Get some equipment to analyze the chemical compounds of beers, automatically classify them and use it to recommend beers based on your personal flavor preferences.