For my birthday party we lined up about 25 bombers of beer and got through about 16 of them. Here's a spreadsheet of our general "like it" rating from 1-10 ordered from least favorite to most favorite. About 2/3rds of the participants were mild beer liker drinkers meaning they drink some interesting stuff beyond Bud but don't go out of their way to spend $20 on a bomber while the other 1/3rd have gotten into the crazy beer scene within the last few years. Here's the spreadsheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FaZ4d6mB_3PnkuonNOwiW9NXS6Ris_vx7Tenx6K09NI/edit#gid=0 Comment away on our deviations from BA's general scores ;-) For me, after drinking them and wrapping back around, I think the Pivo Pils is too low on our list. After having a bunch of ales the Pivo really tasted different and good to me. We didn't like the Duet and the Ruffian as much as the BA community. The Ruffian was very polarizing - a few of the drinkers didn't like the barrel flavor. The Duet, I dont know, I'm not sure why it's sitting at 95 on BA. Also I think the BA community score for Walkers Reserve is too low. That beer is on draft at the nearby Firestone brewpub and isn't generally available anymore, but we found it to be fairly solid drinkable porter.
Interesting idea. Sounds like a good time for all. Lots of info in the table, but more info needed to compare results between your table and the BA scores. What order were the beers tasted? What temperature control was used? How long did this party go on? How large were the individual portions? Any food and water available? Anybody a smoker? Any palate changers or palate resetters used between samples?
11 drinkers and 16 beers, I would be worried about palate fatigue. I agree with all of drtth's questions. What were the other 9 beers your group didn't drink? The average and median of 17 BF stands out to me. Seems to be the one that deviates the most from BA score. Did they try prior BF vintages?
Did people know what they were drinking (before, after, or during)? I like to do larger tastings in waves. Say wave 1 would be 4 pilsners. Wave 2 would be 4 IPAs. Wave 3 your Stouts. It's fun to have "perceived" duds along side the greatest and latest. Without getting too scientific for a fun event, line up 4 at a time, and have everyone try them blindly. After a quick first impression and ranking, unveil the beers. The fun variable is that you can either tell people ahead of time what the 4 beers are, or watch as they rank a "turd" above something hyped.
Firestone walker reserve porter is great. It's a shame it's no longer available. If that beer was in 12 oz 6 packs it would cut into my founder porter space.
Well Alpine Duet now (GF version) is not exactly the Duet of years past. Plenty of ratings from the old - imo much better - one brewed at Alpine.
hm on a 1 to 10 scale there are some pretty brutal scores on that Track 7 beer. My daughter brought me that one back when she was out in Sacramento, I actually forgot about it and drank it about 4 months old and thought it held up great. If you don't like what blood orange does in a beer, then it can be a turnoff.
This is a good idea. A lot of random beers arrived, and I felt bad not letting people drink some of the stuff they brought. Back in the day I used to go to bars with friends on slow nights and ask for every vodka (or tequila or whatever) the house had and we'd blind taste test. We'd line em up in order of our preference. Fairly fun game to play.
Bravo Firestone Pliny the Elder Russian River Westmalle Trappist The Abyss Deschuttes Victory at Sea Ballast Point Young Double Chocolate Boo Koo Mother Earth Northern Hemisphere Wet Hop IPA Seirra Nevada Santas little helper Port We simply got plowed off the other stuff and couldn't continue.
Yea, I was making fun of everyone about how snobby we were. I believe the problem stemmed from starting with Pivo. Because it was first pretty much everyone gave it 5 as a sort of starting point. But it's actually pretty damn good. Next time we'll start with Coors light or something ;-)
These are solid points as it relates to me asking for opinions in comparison to BA ratings. A lot of what went down was highly unprofessional, however, I'll answer anyways: * Pretty much everything was in an ice bucket * 4 hours * Most were 2 oz, however, the pivo many had about 6 oz and the walkers reserve some had as much as 12oz (we had 68oz of it in a growler) * chips/salsa, pita chips, fried chicken, biscuits, slaw, water * no smokers * not in a controlled manner no, I forced everyone to have water a few times but not for the purpose of cleansing palates. People were all over the place and controlling this would've been fairly challenging.
Ohhh man, I would love to see the scores with Bravo, Pliny, Abyss, and Santa's Lil Helper in there. Understandable you guys were too plowed -- I would be too! Lol
