Have you wondered how CAMRA selects pubs for the annual Good Beer Guide? Each CAMRA branch is responsible for the entries in its area within the county and each listed pub must consistently serve real ale (and real cider if offered) of good quality.

To help us do this, we collect beer quality information through CAMRA's National Beer Scoring System (NBSS) in which members are asked to contribute scores for pubs throughout the year. It is easy to score your beers in NBSS. Log in to CAMRA's online pub guide, WhatPub (http://whatpub.com), using your membership number and the same password that you use to enter the CAMRA national website. Search for the pub and enter a score for each beer that you drank in the Submit Beer Scores panel on the right of the screen. There is plenty of help and information about NBSS on the Beer Scoring tab. A version of WhatPub optimised for use on a smart phone is due to be launched in August and a downloadable app will appear later, so you can score your beer in the pub while you drink it! If you don't have online access at all, then ask your NBSS Coordinator at a branch meeting for paper forms and we will enter your scores for you.

Having collected thousands of beer scores over the year, we generate a report in December giving the average, best and worst scores for each pub and a confidence factor based on the number of scores received. The Branch Committee uses these data to draw up a list of eligible pubs with the highest average score, supplemented by other sources of information, and then visits them to update the pub details ahead of a selection meeting in February, at which we select our quota for the next Good Beer Guide.

To make this work better, we need many more members to enter their scores. We value the opinions of all members whether active or not and we need as many opinions as possible for as many pints in as many pubs as possible. This is so we can have confidence in the statistics. We ask members to score the pubs continually not just once or twice. NBSS works across the country not just in our branch. If you are not a member but would like your opinions of beer quality in pubs to count, then join CAMRA!