Back in October we tried an Octoberfest bake off (a taste test) and it wasn’t that successful. Nice.. not thrillin’, but nice. So when a different group of my friends suggested a blind IPA taste testing, I wasn’t very optimistic; but of course I was game anyway.
Surprise! Not only was it a great evening, the winners and losers made it all that much more interesting. We scored them differently than I had done previously, not just on an overall impression like the unofficial Hop-Talk rating system is built upon, but rather a much more detailed method using a standard beer judging sheet. It is based on an overall score of 50 points made up of several categories.
Here are the results. I rounded the averages of the four of us playing judge…
My comments after the tasting go like this…
Rogue - Yes, it stood alone at the top.
Stone – One of my favorite IPA’s. My score for it probably would have been higher but I hadn’t just taken a break in tasting for a slice of Buffalo Pizza… probably not the best idea and probably affected the overall result.
Butternut – We were all surprised by this one, but me most of all as I really don’t like Butternut’s other brews. I’m going to have to go back for this one.
Middle Ages – While we all know and love this IPA, none of us expected it to rate so high. Glad to see it up there.
Sam Smith – I nailed the import.
I had a great time doing this… I don’t know if the flavors varied that much greater than the octoberfest styles, or if the method in judging was what made it so much better. In any case, the casual nature and long evening in which we took to do it was one for the books.
Special thanks to our servers, Ellie & Katie, and their scientific strategy to organization assuring accurate test results. (We will excuse the Yuengling Porter incident.)
I don’t know that it’s really a good idea to include your standard IPA (British or American version) with Imperial (Double) IPAs in the same “set”.
Not that this isn’t interesting in and of itself, of course. I’m shocked at the poor showing by Dogfish Head. I have had and really enjoyed their 60 Minute.
Nice idea, it’s jsut that your taste buds were probably fried by the third IPA you tasted. Can you publish the order in which they were sampled? That’ll have a lot to do to explain the poorer scores of some of the bolder beers. Also, I’d like to suggest this book:
Evaluating Beer: http://www.amazon.com/Evaluating-Beer-Brewers-Publications/dp/0937381373
It’ll help you refine your score shhet. It looked a little heaving on Flavor and little light on Mouthfeel. Cheers!
personally I’d care more how it tastes more then how it feels
Wow, Dogfish Head dead last in a blind test. Do you think it would have performed better if you had seen the labels?
By the way, another blogger here in Portland had a brilliant idea for beer competitions like this: a bracket tournament, with initial rankings taken from Beer Advocate.
Ron did do something similar to that a couple years ago:
http://hop-talk.com/2006/10/23/oktoberfest-beer-battle-champion/