How many IPAs is the right amount for a blind tasting?

Doing more than 4 IPAs in one evening is going to be unfair to the beers and to yourselves as even with adequate palate cleansers there are carry over effects. Remember that the ability to pick up and detect flavors depends on both the sense of smell and the sense of taste and they are both among the slowest senses to recover from being banged hard. So allow a good bit of time between each beer to give the palate as much time as possible to recover from being banged about.

For palate cleansers use unsalted crackers and have lots of water. Other things change the palate but don't really do as much to reset it.

 

This is just my opinion but I try not to have more than 2-4 new beers at a sitting. If I want more beer I switch to mine after that (I'm a home brewer). I like to try new beers on a fresh palate.

 

12. That's the equivalent of 2-12oz bottles/cans, using 2oz pours per person.

 

Hmmm, then I'd definitely stick to 4 IPAs max for the basic tasting. Then you can switch to "finish off the leftover beers" mode and have time for some good social time as well. (Good use for your bigger bottles and your back up bottles. Also maybe have a few other treats tucked away just in case.) Nothing says you have to schedule only one tasting session and use up all the beers you've got in one evening....

 

I voted 2-4 but it would depend on the beers being tested. Some are more brutal to the taste buds than others.

 

So for the "official" part of the tasting, folks are only drinking 2 beers. Then you go back and finish off the big/extra bottles, or switch to another style to refresh the palate.

 

While I've done this for novelty sake, I wouldn't do it with rare beer you're trying for the first time.

 

I'd say more than one...

 

I'd say 4 is the most at one time to taste. With such an intense flavor profile IPAs and DIPAs your palate will be wrecked quickly and it will be difficult to discern the different hop nuances of each beer.

 

2-4 to keep it sane where everyone can have a full beer and not just a 4 oz pour. There are some beers I that liked with a few sips, but at the end of the bottle i would have ranked it different. Fresh counts too.

 

there is no right amount but the number is probably 5-6

 

If you've had most of these IPAs before, bracket style works great (2 IPAs head to head each night, with one moving on to next round. Adjust your ratings to ensure the one you enjoyed more is rated higher). When you're all done your competition, you'll truly have your IPA's racked and stacked much better (for your own preferences) than all of the factors that may have erroneously influenced your ratings previously when done solo.

We just did a Hefeweisen "final 4" style bracket buster and we're down to the championship round (started with 12). Weistephaner (no surprise there) vs. Franziskaner Hefe-Weisse which was quite a surprise and a previously ranked underdog that beat out a lot of heavyweights along the way to the championship match.

 

I voted 2-4 but I think it's gotta be four, not 2 or 3

 

Ditto. There are some that I would be very hesitant to try anything after having just one. 4 is pretty much going to be max for me regardless.

 

I'd do 2 tastings, one with 6 of the 11 and one with the remaining 5. I'd make sure the 6 beer tasting included 2 of the UJ/Sculpin/RPM since these are more readily available examples and could be "benchmarks" for the 4 east coast beers. Also, I'm assuming that this is for a group of friends and not a hardcore science experiment. Tasting each new beer on a fresh palate would be ideal, but it can be difficult to coordinate everybody's schedules before they're no longer super fresh.

 

By nine, I'm blind.

 

I recently ran a blind IPA tasting with 10 IPAs, nothing double, white, black, Belgian, or session - just American IPAs. We took a break after 5 and had a bit to eat. Pours were 3 oz each.

I think it worked well and palete fatigue did not seem to be an issue as the 10th and last IPA we tasted, Surly Furious, got the highest scores by a good amount. 2nd - 4th were Ballast Point Sculpin, Deschutes Fresh Squeezed, and Summit Saga.