I know NOTHING about beer

Like I said, it was a poor example of the style: I got ZERO salt from it. Was really struggling between Saison or Berliner for that one, eventually deciding it was a very mild Saison since 1) it didn't taste lactic, 2) there was a distinct yeasty bitterness on the finish, and 3) Saison is a broad, inclusive style. Overall flavor was super mild though; I was surprised it was even 5% (my guess was ~3.8%). Definitely not 13.5%! Love the decision to include a Gose in a blind quiz like this btw.

We did 12 beers total with breaks after each group of 4 (during which the admin told us the previous beers and revealed current scores). They didn't seem to be grouped in any particular order.

Also Pisgah Hellbender (quite good) and Surly Furious (was definitely an old can, at least 6 months). Can't remember the others.

 

I'd say Salt of the Earth... because nothing else tastes that foul

 

Agreed. The vintage Chimay Red tasted nothing like a Dubbel btw; can't remember what I guessed for that one but I know I didn't guess anything Belgian. Pretty sure this group would've posted impressive results with straightforward examples of each style.

 

I agree. It would be interesting to see a test like this with more of your everyday crafts that we've all had a thousand times before. I'd like to think I could pick out a beer like Sierra Nevada Pale in a test like this but I'm sure there are other Cascade-dominate pales that could confuse me.

 

You disgust me! Surrender you cellar to me immediately!

 

well some so called styles like saison is so different no 1 can even tell what a true saison is anyway. kind of goes to show yea style is BS. plus poor reps for the so called style would make that test meaningless to me. like this style: Bière de Garde to me this and saison I can never tell apart.
heck some golden and pale ales taste the same to me to be honest.

 

Somebody set this up for me, I want to play!

 

if your buying them and bringing them down here and we can play guess which beer....I got a few to add to it.

 

I think ABV would be really hard as some beers really mask it well. Vintage? Forget about it. Maybe with Bigfoot since that's the only beer I've done multiple times in verts.

We did a blind of the four most well-known PA pilsners (two of which I drink a ton of each year in Prima and Sunshine) and I got all four wrong. The Prima was undated and way off (no hop flavor at all), so I have an excuse, though . I probably still would have been at best 2-4.

We also did St. Bernardus 12, Westy 12, and Rochefort 10 all in one sitting and were pretty easily able to tell which was which.

Blind with no idea of beers or styles I'm sure would be beyond difficult, especially since there's such overlap in beers and styles and since there are beers that really defy those murky style descriptions. I'm sure I would have an extremely low score given the scenario.

Question: which beers were served?

 

Honestly I may be able to blind guess the style and that's probably about it. Maybe ABV if I got the style right just for the sole fact that I know certain styles generally stick to certain ABVs. Some beers hide ABV really well though so I would think that could be hard really hard.

 

the way it happened was the host went into a different room and came out with a decanter filled with beer. it would then be poured into 8 or so identical glasses and we'd get 10 minutes to swirl, sniff, taste, trash talk, etc. it was a lot more challenging than any of us expected. by the end of the contest, we started to catch on and started to use a bit of logic as to what beers our host might have a lot of that he was looking to pour. guesses were all over the board though for pretty much everything. biggest surprise was how good pisgah hellbender was.

to be fair, the gose was the first beer of the day that we had. i hadn't eaten breakfast or consumed anything at that point...so if the first thing you put in your body is a beer, the alc (to me at least) comes across pretty intensely. this year on my birthday i started the day off with an egg sandwich and a KBS and it was a challenge to put down the KBS due to the alcohol. that's usually a beer that i can toss back with no issues and i tend to prefer higher ABV beers.

as for the salt of the earth, i was fairly certain it was a kuhnhenn beer that i had tried recently that was around town, so my guess was more based on what i thought the beer was and then went with all the stats for said beer. it was also the first gose i had ever had.

it was definitely a REALLY fun event and i look forward to defending my title at the next one.

 

I think the trick to figuring out the ABV would be to correctly guess the brewery and beer and then just get the abv from memory

 

Blind tastings are the ultimate test.

 

I think I mightve gotten a 4. Probably just the styles. I suck at ABV and other things.
I think this would be fun to do actually.

Cheers!

 

ULTIMATE SUPER SAIYAN CICERONE MASTER TEST

 

Do you enjoy beer? If answer is yes, score "win".

Seriously though, this challenge would be rough on several BA's for anything other than style usually.

 

Reminds me of this episode:

 

Bullshit. If I lined up several beers and said "Guess the ABV" you'd probably get every single one wrong. Unless you're talking the difference between 4% and 12% in 2 beers side by side, I bet it's damn near impossible to guess the ABV of a given beer when not knowing the brewer or style.

 

According to the man who did the research on saisons and spoke at our hb club there is no difference between biere de garde and saison other than the traditional area of Belgium from which they originate. And many people feel golden and pale are the same, so not surprising they taste like the same style.

 

I would have scored a 0.