USA vs the Rest of the World Part 1

The RateBeer best awards http://www.ratebeer.com/RateBeerBest/? have always made me think.

All awards hove there Pro and Cons and im a big fan of RateBeer but the Dominance of US beer and breweries in the RateBeers best and top 50. Along side this some surprising UK entries that seem to have a much higher placing than me or the beer people i know would expect but on closer examination have a large distribution in the US.  All this has regularly made me think that maybe US members rate beers higher then Non US members.

Now without Access to the Database where im sure some large scale analysis could be done, im going to try looking at several beers  that will hopefully have a reasonable number of ratings from both US and Non US members.

So for Part 1, I have taken
Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout vs Westvleteren 12 (XII)

I looked at distribution of the Top 20 and Bottom 20 raters of each beer. (excluding as is ratebeers way any with less than 10 rates)

So for
Darklord all 20 top raters were from the US but only 10 of the Bottom Raters were
Where as for
Westvletern 13 of the top raters were from NON US countries but 11 of the bottom were also NON US raters

Now Its a  small sample of only 2 beers so id be fairly certain its statistically insignificant, but i hope to look at other beers in this way and others and see if a pattern emerges