Wanna see some really depressing?

It was a poll on the Web, hence international in character. And it's not too surprising, as American- style megabrewery lagers are by far the best selling beers in the world. It's only natural that they'd come out on top in a self-selected poll of the general population. (You think something from a tiny brewery in Croatia, that only brews for the couple hundred people in the neighborhood, would get enough votes to place in the top 1000, let alone 100?)

If you took a poll of beer drinkers across any geographic location asking what the favorite beer was, I would expect that the highest selling beers would also register as most popular. Not a very revealing poll since it restates what we already know about the large brewers: Their products are popular with a lot of people.

If you polled U.S. beer drinkers for their favorites I would expect that local favorites like Dominion and Dog Fish Head would not pop above the horizon.

Where you take polls has a big influence on the population sampled and results too.

"This poll runs from May 19, 1999 - December 17, 1999."

Real up-to-date results, too.

But the results suggest that it wasn't set up by, nor aimed at, a non-American voting group, in spite of the international nature of the WWW. If people in other countries don't even know about the silly "celebrity1000.com" poll, the sample size from outside of the USA is bound to be vanishingly small.

Also, there are more recent self-selecting polls with quite different results.

The sample size of the poll is absurdly small to begin with: a total of

2519 votes, with no guarantee of validity (how many votes cast twice by the same person and all that). Note, too, that the Simon/Bitburger brewery is quite large - not as large as the biggest of the American megas, but large nonetheless - and it barely even showed up on the radar. I'm guessing that this was very much a USA-centric "poll" that did an utterly crap job of representing anything but a self-selecting, and probably multiple-voting, sample of a small number of American beer-drinking "voters."

My feelings exactly.c