Blind Tasting Suggestions (all styles)

25 beers, 5 each from 5 different styles is much too ambitious and will result in several unfair judgments owing to fatigued palates long before the finish.

Even with appropriate Palate cleansers (e.g., unsalted crackers and plenty of water) 5 beers in one session is plenty. (There is a very good reason why beer judging is done by mostly trained and experienced judges only working with one style and taking breaks between sessions.)

Much more informative would be having 5 different tastings, one for each style, to pick the preferred choice in each style.

 

To be fair, she didn't specify whether this is in one sitting or multiple, but, yeah, doing 25 at once would be way too much.

 

The first thing that jumps out to me is in the American Brown category. You have 3 "regular" brown ales and then a 9% coffee brown and a 12% wood aged brown that are going to be radically differentiable from the others.

 

@drtth is right on with his suggestion to conduct 5 different tastings spaced over a period of time. Maybe this was your original intention anyway but you didn't explicitly state so?

As regards the hoppy beers (IPA/DIPA) it would be ideal to obtain all of the beers to be equally fresh. For example, if three of the IPAs are relatively fresh (e.g., less than 2 months old) and two are non-fresh this will distort your results. I have no good suggestions on how to ensure that all five of the beers of a given category is fresh. Maybe generate a prioritized list of IPAs and select the top five which are freshest.

Permit me to suggest some alternates for the IPA category: Firestone Walker Union Jack, Stone IPA, Maine Lunch, Sixpoint Bengali, Captain Lawrence IPA, ...

Cheers!

 

Do you have some flexibility here with respect to scheduling? Could you conduct these tastings over two weekend (3 tastings per weekend) instead? In one sense I suppose it could be fun to have 6 tastings over a weekend but I would think this would be taxing for my personal palate. Not that I would say "no" to an invitation to join the festivities.

Cheers!

 

One other thing that I notice is that at least one of the stouts (BCS) is seasonal, so unless you already have some or it's sitting on shelves, you may not be able to locate any. This then led to the thought that maybe you should be doing a maybe "seasonal" tasting. Instead of stouts, do pilsners (Prima Pils, Pivo Pils, The Crisp, Nooner, Brooklyn). Instead of Brown, do sours (Westbrook Gose, Ithaca Cayuga Cruiser, SN Otra Vez, DFH Festina Peche, Anderson Valley Briney Melon).

 

If Pilsners are now in consideration below is my suggested list:

Sly Fox Pikeland Pils

Victory Prima Pils

Troegs Sunshine Pils

Sixpoint Crisp

Genesee Pilot Batch Brew House North German style Pilsner

 

Great beer choices on the categories you picked!!

 

In an attempt to keep your plan as intact as possible, I would make the following suggestions:
- Drop the saison category
- Do your IPAs on Saturday morning, and the imperial IPAs in the afternoon
- Go with the favorite in each - head to head on Saturday night
- Do your brown ales on Sunday morning, and the stouts in the afternoon
- Go with the favorite in each - head to head on Sunday night
- Leave it at that

 

To elaborate on that suggestion, I'm not sure with the blind tastings done earlier in the day how the taster's could be blind for the evening head to head. As an alternative to trying to do a blind head to head you might look at having the evening sessions be a "drink it and discuss it" where the focus is on eveyone sharing what they think they are picking up in the beers and the pros and cons of each of the two beers. While this wouldn't give an overall winner, it would create some time for sharing information about the differences in people's impressions, the ingredient's list and how they are brewed, etc.

 

I agree, I think putting palo with the stouts makes more sense than brown ales. It's a big beer I don't think it's a fair comparison.

 

5 choices per each category is good but I would maybe go 6-7 and only have 3-4 categories.

I'm not sure what your goal is. It does sound fun. For my tastings, I love including local mainstays, regional mainstays, and EVERYTHING in between. Find a 76 rated IPA, a 80, 85, mostly some 90s, and then some higher end stuff. Can you pick out the "mediocre" stuff? Maybe it's not so bad and preferred as a group.

Maybe you do a ranking system. Maybe you do what my buddies and I do . We ask "Do we like it? Is it worth its price (sometimes trade value/time is taken into consideration)? Do we prefer it and want it again? More often than not it seems like a local beer wins out and then we wonder why we don't drink it more often; why we tend to dismiss a great local IPA thats always available when its actually winning so many blind tastings.

 

It's a killer beer, I would find a way to get it in the tasting for sure.

 

Hi guys, I am also looking for some blind tasting suggestions. A few of us are getting together in Oct. Ive got some sweet blinds put together. I want to go deeper though. I want to do a Mystery Bottle Blind tasting for my friends. I want surprise them with a six bottle blind and have none of them know what bottles are in the blind. I am looking for the most out there theme possible.

 

Find five Cherry Stouts, and make the 6th an infected BCBS which will taste like cherry