Beer Tournament

This is a great idea!

 

I would suggest trial and error - that would give you an excuse to try it out several times until you get it right.

 

Cool idea.

Why not do a Pale ale tourney, stout tourney etc and find your favorites of the styles. It would be hard for me to make a choice between a top IPA and Stout. My choice would change depending on the day. Even more interesting is to do this tourney by style once a month for a year and see the results.

Enjoy

 

March 2016 will be my 4th such tournament. Except I do my top rated BREWERIES instead of beers. I use this as a way to revisit beers/breweries that I haven't had in a while comparing them. I randomly select a style for each region and stick to it best that I can.

I would love to have a way to have other people participate or vote, but I didn't think anyone would be interested. I'm glad I'm not the only beer dork that enjoys comparing/ranking breweries.

 

It's not overly impressive, but I did find a way to post my bracket for others to play along. Search "Beer Tournament" on Facebook if you would like to check it out.

 

I think all of the same style would be best. How would you decide between a stout/IPA matchup? Not really comparable.

 

Where would the upsets come from though? Like the idea haha

 

The OP had an idea to make a beer tournament bracket like I had an idea to run electrical current through thin wire inside a glass bulb in order to provide illumination

 

Stout. See how easy that was?

 

This happend a lot last year

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...he-bracket-to-find-the-best-brews-in-america/
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/03/459095
http://www.pennlive.com/beer-brackets/

 

Each seed should mirror the actual tournament with the best beer (rating) that brewed in that college town or the closest to it. That would be kind of cool.

 

Surprised nobody has mentioned the National IPA Challenge?
http://www.brewingnews.com/nipac/

 

If I were to structure it, I'd have the four regions be: Stouts, IPA's, Sours and the very best of other beers. Then it's not like all the #1's make the Final Four like Good Morning, KBBS, Morning Delight and Heady.

Maybe making a Sweet 16 or Elite 8 to enjoy during the tournament would be a good way to try my cellar beers

 

There have been similar 'tournaments' in the past that might be interesting for comparisons or ideas. Here's a link to an IPA challenge: http://www.beeradvocate.com/communi...-an-ipa-bracket-challenge.81471/#post-1175252

 

I think by region would be good, just like the NCAA tourney...I couldn't have just 4 categories

 

I would like to at least play devil's advocate on this one and make an argument for making the regions geographical.

First point is sheer logistics. It seems difficult at best to condense beer style regions down to four main groups. Undoubtedly that process would be unfair to some really worthy but lesser produced styles.

Second point is that the actual tourney does it that way so best replica would do the same. How else could we give less widely distributed great beers some home court advantage!?

Third and last point is that you could still work styles into the seeding like this: create your list of styles and do mini tournaments or just poll to see which one would get the automatic bid for that style. Then you could fill in the rest of the bracket with at-large bids for beers that didn't get picked to represent their style or are of styles that didn't get an auto bid. The favored beers would get to be seeded in their region and the underdogs would have to "travel".

Cheers

Edit: also, I just like the idea of different styles going head to head often. In the bball tourney everyone is always talking about "match-ups". Ex) BCBS might knock off _insert random beer of different style_ that is also barrel aged because people are focusing on the barrel aged aspects but not beat say a non BA DIPA because the people voting might prefer that style.

 

I've done a couple of these with friends. We did them on a smaller scale - just a sweet 16. Did on e with all IPAs and another with 8 German pilsners on one side and 8 Czech pilsners on the other.