Tag Archives: butternuts

IPA Bake Off

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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.

scoring chart

Here are the results. I rounded the averages of the four of us playing judge…

ipa-taste-test
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.)

Butternuts Porkslap Farmhouse Ale

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Octoberfest 2007 has come and gone and we sampled many, many, different types of beers. There were so many good beers, I can’t even begin to attempt to pick out my favorite. However, there was one that stood out… unfortunately, it stood out in a bad way.

Butternuts Porkslap Pale Ale had one of the funkiest tastes I have ever tasted. First off, it is barely a pale ale, but I don’t know how to classify it other than a specialty ale.

Butternuts tells us…

it a new interpretation if the English Pale Ale with a hint of fresh ginger spices

balanced, not overly bitter, easy to drink and incredibly refreshing

it pours orange and crystal clear with a frothy white head

I don’t know what the taste was, but it was funky; a bad funk. Perhaps it was a bad batch. Mine did not pour clear and had a weak head of foam supporting the “bad batch” theory. I didn’t taste ginger, unless what I did taste was supposed to be a hint of ginger. It is unfortunate.

My local beverage center now has a mixed twelve pack Butternut beers on the shelf — but I doubt I’m going try it even if this was a bad batch; consistency is just as important as taste. It is a factor of quality. I stopped buying the Saratoga Lager for the same reason.

Leave it to marketing and a cheap price that got me to taste it in the first place, but once bitten, twice shy.