Apparently the age of tasting competitions has arrived. Over the weekend, two such events ended or evolved, and Oregon did well in both cases.
Beer BrawlFirst, the Concordia Ale House hosted the second Annual Beer Brawl, a taste-off of four beers from Oregon, Washington, and California. Hat tip to John Foyston for
posting the results he got off (drum roll please)
the new Concordia website. (I'm actually more excited about that. I have now added their taplist to my list in the column at right.) Oregon cleaned up, 1160 to 941 for Washington and 840 for Cali. Deschutes' Armory XX Pale was the beer of the brawl.
2009 National IPA ChallengeI have been seeing references to this, but I really haven't the vaguest clue where it's happening, who's doing the tasting, or how the beers and brackets were selected. All I know is that Oregon's doing great--five of the Sweet 16 are NW, a quarter from Oregon. I turn now to Geoff Kaiser
for this weekend's updates.While many of us were pulling for all the NW IPAs to do well in Round 2 of the NIPAC this past weekend, I’m not sure anyone would have predicted the domination that our beloved IPAs smacked down on some very well-known challengers. The NW won all five of their matchups, including upsets of what could be termed 2 different “#1 seeds."
- Boundary Bay IPA takes down the well-known Bear Republic Racer 5 (none of us are surprised, but the rest of the country probably is…)
- Rogue Yellow Snow IPA defeats the midwest heavyweight of Bell’s Two-Hearted (I picked the Rogue upset here - hell yeah…great beer.)
- Big Sky IPA defeats Mad Anthony Sofa King’s Bitter IPA
- Deschutes Inversion IPA defeats Magic Hat HIPA
- Laurelwood IPA defeats Avery IPA
Round 3 Matchups:
Big Sky IPA vs. Moylan’s IPA
Boundary Bay IPA vs. Deschutes Inversion (NW vs. NW!)
Rogue Yellow Snow vs. Marin IPA
Laurelwood Workhorse IPA vs. Hoppin’ Frog Hoppin’ to Heaven IPA
So whatever it is, we're doing all right.
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I have always intended to do a survey of mass market lagers, and there's nothing like a book chapter to bring urgency to such a plan. So on Wednesday I went out and rounded up a bunch of them (there are tons, more than you probably imagine) and last night Sally and I cracked open the first chunk. To make this interesting, I will list the beers I tried and you can guess which were the tastiest. I'd put one head and shoulders above the rest, another two were quite nice, two were skunked (green bottles!) but somewhat discernible, and one was really quite bad. So the challenge--which was the really good and which the really bad? (I've listed the countries of origin, not necessarily where they were produced.)
