The best-scoring beers in the book are, of course, merely the best-scoring of the beers we tasted. And make no mistake, there are a lot of beers we didn’t taste. According to the Brewer’s Association, as of April 2010, there were 1,599 breweries in the US alone. We only tasted 250 beers!

That said, we’ve covered most of the US beer market by volume (thanks to our near-comprehensive coverage of pale lagers) and in my opinion the list we used does a fine job of giving broad coverage to the beers out there. If you start at the top of our lists and work your way down, you’ll give yourself exposure to a huge chunk of the best parts of the beer market. And you’ll have an excellent base for comparative evaluations of the beers at your local brewpubs and microbreweries.

That said, I’m off to check out the excellent tap list at Produce Row. Cheers!

Some of those lines are in the same mold as our presentation. Like how similar are light beers to water? That is, what do I have to do to the beer (or to the water) to make it indistinguishable in a triangle test? Or how true is the conventional wisdom about American Guinness being totally different (and inferior) to Guinness in Ireland?

Other questions that I have are broader. One idea I have been pondering came to me in an unexpected day in San Francisco after I was bumped from my flight home. I was in a pub with a decent number of taps and a selection that seemed somehow quintessentially Bay Area to me—there were decent choices, but nothing particularly interesting or unusual. This particular venue offered Speakeasy Big Daddy IPA, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Anchor Steam, Fat Tire, New Belgium Ranger IPA, Pyramid Haywire Hefeweizen, Guinness, Stella Artois, Newcastle Brown, Heineken, Budweiser, Coors Light, and MGD Light. Of that baker’s dozen of beers, MGD Light is the most unusual sighting in that list (for a list of this type and depth; I’m sure there are more MGD Light taps around the country than Big Daddy taps. I just don’t see them at the places I frequent).

How do different cities fare in terms of tap depth and diversity? How would you measure such a thing? How do you compensate for the impact of size and the arbitrariness of city boundaries (like the fact that Queens is part of New York City, but Oakland is not part of San Francisco)? I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but I’m intrigued by the challenge of coming up with a metric for draft beer tap diversity and exploring how different cities score.

In the near-term I’ll be pondering that question over beers in a number of locations around the city, as Portland celebrates Oregon Craft Beer Month. Next week is Sour Beer Week at Belmont Station, and I expect that I’ll enjoy several stops there.

Ideas or thoughts on how to quantify (particularly through some kind of limited sampling approach) tap diversity are enthusiastically welcome. Comment here or drop me an email and we’ll chat.

The last few weeks Belmont Station has had a series of events called “Barrel Monday” where they have a pair of barrel-aged beers on draft. Last week I enjoyed a glass of Russian River Consecration—a little hard around the edges, but a very respectable sour ale.

Tonight’s Barrel Monday featured Deschutes 2009 Abyss and Black Butte XXI, and if they’re trying to bring customers in, it’s working; the bar side of the place was about as full as I’ve seen it. Pleasantly mild weather surely helped. They also had a deeper selection of lower-alcohol beers on, too, including Heater-Allen IsarWeizen (a decent Bavarian wheat beer, which was tasty enough but lacked the beautiful head and carbonation of traditional hefes) and a southeast Portland classic: Rogue Younger’s Special Bitter on cask.

I ran into a half-dozen old friends over the course of a couple beers and made a couple new ones. It’s good to sit on the sidewalk with a beer. Do you have a regular watering hole, where you expect to bump into people? Or do you enjoy pints wherever you find yourself?

There’s been less than normal amounts of beer in my life the last few weeks, but plenty of The Beer Trials. I was in Puerto Rico for a week, and failed to try a local mango-flavored beer that I heard some positive comments about. I did try one local pale lager that was too cold to taste. Mostly I enjoyed rum, which is not something I drink much.

I did have one noteworthy beer experience, though: Just before I left on that trip, I attended the last garage-wine tasting that Vincent over at Elevage will be hosting for the foreseeable future (he’s moved from garage wine to commercial facilities). Recalling that last year, other guests brought generous supplementary tasting materials, I looked in the basement for a bottle to bring. None of the wine down there seemed suitable, but there was a spare bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru, which seemed like it might be relatively at home in the company of some fine wines.

Long story short, the bottle didn’t get much love for the first hour or so I was there. People were perplexed why there was a bottle of beer, but didn’t seem particularly curious to find out. It looked like I was going to be the only person enjoying the wonderful sour ale. I began to wish that I’d just told Vincent to save it for later.

However, as the other bottles emptied out, a few people finally gave it a shot. And at least some of them got it. I saw several doubletakes and heard more than a few exclamations of “Woah, you’ve got to try this…”

I don’t have any burning need to convince the world that everyone should be drinking Flanders reds—or any particular beer, for that matter—but it’s wonderful to be able to challenge people’s expectations and open their eyes to the near-radical diversity of the beer world. If you’ve never tried a sour ale, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.

I’ll be heading to California in a couple weeks to join Robin for the American Association of Wine Economists’ annual conference. When I return in July, I expect we’ll have some more announcements about The Beer Trials and where it’s headed that will be even more exciting than the website launch.

It’s a good time to be a beer drinker. Especially in Portland, where spring appears to be almost here…

That’s my kind of party. Hopefully I’ll be fully recovered from FredFest, which is two days earlier. Also, I think, my kind of party.

The party is at 7PM next Wednesday—May 12th—so feel free to drop in. We’ll have copies of the book; if you’d already purchased one and you’d like to get it signed or have a gift copy inscribed, feel free to bring it with you.

While we chatted I enjoyed a Boulevard Maibock. Boulevard doesn’t distribute much outside of the Midwest, which is good for Midwesterners and a bit of a shame for the rest of us. You can find their Smokestack series of small-production beers in good specialty shops all over, though. But to see an everyday, have-a-pint-or-two Boulevard beer is a treat, because they do a fine job.

And there aren’t a lot of American craft brewers pushing the craft-and-lager-drinker crossover beers these days, but as weather gets warm, they’re a good call. I like the current trend towards Kölsch-style beers (like Goose Island Summertime Ale or the periodically-available Widmer Collaborator Kölsch), but that’s more of a summer style. Maibocks do a good job of straddling the conundrum described in this Baltimore Sun column: enough body for blustery April (or in Portland, May) showers, but light enough for the gorgeous summer-is-coming afternoons, too.

At any rate, one of my personal beliefs (having been there myself) is that many craft-beer drinkers give short shrift to the quality potential of well made pale lagers, and I dig the beers that can open minds to the possibilities there. And after a week of alternating sun and rain (or both simultaneously) it was lovely to get out on the bike, warm the legs up a bit, relax with an easygoing, flavorful lager, and ride home. I’m looking forward to doing that a lot more often this summer.

See you at the Dragon!

The local market has all manner of those beers. They carry Olympia and Rainier, which aren’t great beers but carry a certain nostalgia for me. I went to high school downwind of the Olympia Brewery, and growing up in the Pacific Northwest meant regular exposure to the quirky and creative television ads that Rainier ran through the ’80s. Both breweries were shuttered after Pabst sold them to Miller in the late ’90s (though Pabst still own both brands).

It struck me, though, that there was an option that might prove more satisfying than either of my erstwhile local beers. Tecate did surprisingly well in our blind tastings for The Beer Trials, garnering a very solid 7 (out of 10). It’s a beer with a dodgy reputation, which is certainly not helped by the packaging. Here’s what I wrote in the book about the design:

Everything about this can screams “Warning! Cheap beer inside!” which doesn’t really do the product justice. On the upside, the beer is cheap. If they had a nicer package, it might cost more.

However, when I eventually located the half-rack of Tecate, I found it priced at some 40% more than the rest of the comparable pale lagers. Tecate was more expensive than Full Sail Session Lager. I was flummoxed. Considering my housemate’s budget, I reversed gears and bought the Rainier. Which worked fine.

What happened, I wondered to my housemates? Did I misremember the price of the stuff? The pricing indicators in the book are largely based on prices we actually paid, and poking around on the internet it appears that my surprise was warranted. Were they jacking up the prices in anticipation of of Cinco de Mayo sales?

Or perhaps, suggested my housemates, they’ve read the book. Maybe it’s your fault the stuff is so expensive.

Also gave my first radio interview today. Portland beer writer Lisa Morrison hosts a program called Beer O’Clock. Not sure when it will air; probably this Saturday or the one after.

I’ve discovered that twitter allows me to eavesdrop on strangers talking about my book, and I like it. A lot.

I’ll be at the Green Dragon tonight, distributing books to the two dozen volunteers who helped make The Beer Trials possible. Also toasting Green Dragon beer buyer (and Beer Trials contributor) Sam Sugar, who is leaving that job to move to Newport. Drop in if you like.

Our first review has hit the beer blog circuit, which is exciting. There’s a comment about our scoring of Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA as a 6, but that’s a typo on our part—we gave it a 7, which in our scoring curve is pretty good.

I imagine that I’m joining all beer and wine critics in hoping that people don’t spend too much time thinking about the scores; I’d rather hear criticism of our tasting notes. Here’s the entry for the 90 Minute IPA. Let me know if it doesn’t seem accurate to you:

Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA
Strong Beer
Rating: 7

Country: USA (Delaware)
Style: Imperial IPA
ABV: 9.0%
Price: $$$$ ($2.50 – $5.00 per 12oz bottle)
Packaging: 12oz/355ml bottle
Characteristics: Hoppy, Strong

Dogfish Head’s Sam Caligione seems incapable of producing a beer that can be casually consumed. Each brew—and 90 Minute IPA is no exception—demands attention. Calling this an IPA is a bit misleading; at 9% alcohol, it’s clearly pushing into “imperial” territory. But more to the point, this doesn’t really come off as an IPA so much as a strong ale or light barleywine.

Flavors and aromas: There are plenty of hops in the nose, and the IBU numbers are nothing to scoff at, but the bitterness is subdued in the face of an onslaught of malty sweetness and a thick, full body. We like this beer, even if we probably couldn’t drink more than one or two in an evening.

Design: The font is hard to read, and it’s hard to tell the Dogfish Head beers apart without reading closely, but we still find a certain charm to these labels.

Happy hunting for The Beer Trials in your local bookstore, and be sure to let us know what you think!

Today I stumbled across a beer blog that I’m totally digging, from a place I wouldn’t have expected. The Beer Nut lives in Ireland—Dublin, even—and he’s got a lot to say about beers of the world, and the local stuff, too. His take on Irish beer is of particular interest to me, since there’s so little of it over here, and what we get is… well, it’s Guinness. I’m sure everyone reading this has an opinion on that beer.

We tasted only five putatively Irish beers for the book: Guinness Draught, Guinness Extra, Smithwick’s, Harp, and Murphy’s. The Guinness is actually made in eastern Canada; the Smithwick’s and Harp likely are as well. The Murphy’s is the only one I’m sure has seen the British Isles, and it’s produced in, uh, Scotland. All of these beers underwhelm me, and particularly irritating is the sense that underwhelming is exactly what they’re shooting for.

So it’s nice to see a lot of my opinions about these beers reflected in The Beer Nut’s blog, along with direct evidence that Ireland can do better, both with stouts and other styles. And it’s always a pleasure to find a lucid, active blogger. His entries are a pleasure to read.

I’ve some vague fantasies about doing a book for Americans on drinking in England. I might have to extend that to the beers of all the islands, and pay a visit.

I particularly liked the entry titled A moment of clarity on discovering a world that didn’t include Guinness in every pub.

Our final panel tasting occurred on Wednesday night; we had a few problematic beers which required retasting, and some last-minute additions and late arrivals. The tasting went well, and to celebrate the completion of that portion of the book I brought out a bottle of Oud Beersel Old Kriek, which was excellent.

One of the points I have tried to push on in the book is the importance for some beers of freshness-dating. Particularly for beers that have low sell-through, aren’t bottle conditioned, and don’t have high alcohol (or other characteristics that will act as preservatives, like the acidity in sour beers), it’s far too easy to get old bottles that are well past their prime. Samuel Smith was a particular challenge for us here. It’s a problem that will vary significantly from city to city, as the imports and craft beers in high demand in Portland aren’t always the ones in demand in Cleveland or Philadelphia.

I was tickled to see that there is a best-by date on the Old Beersel. Lambics—traditionally-styled ones, at least—are built to age, so I wasn’t too worried about it. But there it is—see for yourself.