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When I was a teenager, I drove cross-country with my brother and uncle. One feature of such a trip is that once you get past major population centers, you tend to see the same people over and over again. There are only so many major highways and if you're both traveling in the same general direction, you'll find yourself stopping at the same gas stations, eating at the same roadside stops, and even camping at the same campgrounds. There's a (admittedly trashy) movie called Road Games that relies on this dynamic, making it a sorta moving version of Hitchcock's Rear Window.

I noticed something similar going on during Operation Cheddar V: Bride of Cheddar, only instead of gas stations and campsites, I kept seeing the same people at breweries. Go figure. This is my fifth such trek through the wilds of Vermont in search of beer, and as per usual, it was a lot of fun.

This started off, as per usual, at the Warren Store, where I always go to pick up some of Lawson's Finest Liquids. Alas, both available options were things I'd had before, but then, they're both great:

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That's Sip of Sunshine and Super Session #2, for those keeping count. I also snagged a freshish bottle of Frost's Plush, as I'd heard good things about them.

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From there, I headed up to The Alchemist's new digs in Stowe, VT. For the uninitiated, during the first Operation Cheddar I was able to go to The Alchemist's cannery in Waterbury, VT. However, due to the high level of traffic and with consideration for their town and neighbors, they closed that location to the public and started distributing their beer throughout the state. This made their beer more difficult to snag (at least, for passers-through like myself), but due to intense demand, they were able to open a new brewery facility in Stowe. While the cannery still puts out as much Heady Topper as possible, the new brewery focuses on their other brews, notably Focal Banger and Crusher.

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Limit of one case, but you could get a variety, so I got a mix of Heady Topper, Focal Banger, and The Crusher. That last one is something I've never had before, so you will most certainly be seeing more about that in the near future.

Just a hop and a skip away from there is Lost Nation, which has become a mandatory stop, if for no other reason than their food is just astonshingly good. I had some sort of smoked beef sandwhich, which was great, of course. And I snagged some Gose and The Wind while I was at it.

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Next up is another mandatory stop, Hill Farmstead. They've been doing some expansions of their own, and while lots of folks were there, the lines and waiting have been reduced considerably (though now you get bottles and growlers at two different locations). They also had some vintage bottles for sale, though only for onsite consumption (a bit pricey, to be sure, but probably worth it). I must have hit them at a weird time, as their bottle selections were dwindling rapidly, but hey, it's hard to complain when you get bottles of world class beer:

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That's Casita Cerveceria Del Arboles (this is a contract brewing operation that brews at Hill Farmstead, which is something that obviously requires more scrutiny that will be provided at a later date), Dry-Hopped Arthur (I believe this is another beer that uses Segal Ranch Cascades), Table Dorothy, and growlers of Sumner, Single-Hop Citra, and Single-Hop Nelson Sauvin. What the hell, let's review some of those growlers right now, while we're here and all:

Hill Farmstead Citra Single-Hop Pale Ale - This is pretty much what it sez. I missed out on this during my first exposure to Hill Farmstead many moons ago during Philly Beer Week, so I was glad to finally catch up with it. Pours a cloudy orange-yellow color with a finger of fluffy white head and decent retention. Smells wonderful, bright, juicy citrus leavened by that floral note I tend to get out of Citra. Taste follows the nose, lots of juicy hops, a little of that earthy floral character, finishing on a bitter note. Mouthfeel is medium bodied with fine carbonation and a bit of dryness, quite drillable. Overall, yep, it's fabulous and I feel like even grading on a curve, this rates an A-

Beer Nerd Details: 5.4% ABV from a growler (750 ml swing top). Drank out of a charente glass on 8/5/16. Growler filled 8/4/16.

Hill Farmstead Sumner American Pale Ale - Brewed with Simcoe, Citra, and Mosaic hops? Well, ok, if you're going to twist my arm. Pours a little less cloudy, paler yellow color with a finger of white head. Smells similar, but with less floral character and more dank, resinous pine - still plenty of citrus though! Taste is again more on the dank side, plenty of citrus, a little less bright, but juicy enough, with a little less bitterness in the finish. Mouthfeel is medium bodied, finely carbonated, less dry, very crushable stuff. Overall, less intense, but still quite good. Again grading on a curve, maybe B+ or A-? This is getting impossible you guys.

Beer Nerd Details: 5.2% ABV from a growler (750 ml swing top). Drank out of a tulip glass on 8/6/16. Growler filled 8/4/16.

Then I popped over to Burlington Beer Company, the first time I'd visited. There I met with Kaedrin friend Cian McGuire, who works at the brewery and was busily bottling some beer when I arrived. We had a nice chat and I picked up plenty of beer. Naturally, I forgot to take pictures of the facility, so you'll just have to deal with the haul pic:

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That's It's Complicated Being a Wizard, Peasant King, Peach of Mind, Brettanomyces Incident, and Chunky. Check out that artwork, so nice. Looking forward to these!

Finally, I stopped in at Foam brewery to visit with Lipstick n Lager and try some of their wares. They've only been open for about 4 months, but they're really nailing their IPAs, which in Vermont is really saying something. I only snagged a single growler from them, but you will most definitely be hearing more about it in the near future. And I will almost certainly stop here again next year.

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From there, it was a simple jaunt back to the Adirondacks (where I was staying last week) to enjoy my spoils. I should also mention that I went back to Fulton Chain brewing, which was within walking distance of where I was staying. If you recall, during Operation Cheddar IV: Smoked Cheddar, I stopped in to this place mere weeks after they had opened. I was glad to see that they seem to be well established at this point, with a healthy crowd and many more taplines open.

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Highlights were Go Fluff Yourself (made with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff) and Flooded Tent (a cucumber lime saison). Not quite Vermont levels awesome, but hey, walking distance. I should also add that Officer Bob enjoyed Eskimo Strong, an imperial red/amber:

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Also of note, Wakely's Speakeasy on the other side of town (awesomely named Thendara, NY) that had probably the best Bourbon selection I've ever seen. Very secretive, need a passphrase to get in, and no cell phones/pictures allowed. But live music and again, great whiskey selection (not so good on the beer front, but whatevers). Apparently the owners were from Kentucky, so they've got their connections. Well worth stopping in if you're ever in the area...

And that just about covers another successful Operation Cheddar. Now if you'll excuse me, all this VT beer ain't going to drink itself. I'll leave you with some pictures of Tired Hands beers that I was drinking all week in preparation for Operation Cheddar...

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It was a fun vacation, is what I'm saying. Already looking forward to my next VT odyssey.

The beer nerd world is all aflutter about the so-called "Northeast IPA" (aka "Milkshake IPA", which we'll get to... er, later in this post), exemplified by the juicy, unfiltered, cloudy looking wares of The Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, Treehouse, Trillium, and I'll include local favorite Tired Hands too. This isn't really a new observation, but the current kerfluffle kicked off a few weeks ago with an article in Willamette Week called IPA Is Dead, Long Live IPA in which the author cites Northeast influence on the famed Portland, Oregon brewery scene:

When Portland beer geeks sampled the beers blind, it turned out they preferred brighter, juicier versions like those in the Northeast, which have only recently popped up in Portland. The five best IPAs in the city come from brand-new breweries, and most of those have been influenced by Heady Topper, Julius and Sculpin, beers that present hops as a reward rather than a challenge.

There are a few different things to parse here. One is the transition from punishingly bitter IPAs to pleasantly bright and juicy takes on the style, which is unquestionably happening. Another is that this trend originated in the Northeast; an assertion that is more dubious, as Jeff Alworth points out:

The Northeast, like the rest of the country, is not a monolith. Martin seems to be talking about New England here, but New England was actually very late getting to the hops party. Heady Topper is a fascinating beer, but its influence was basically nil in the pubs and breweries of New England, which have largely tended toward English-inflected, balanced, and notably malty beers. (Its influence among the uber-geeks of BeerAdvocate is another matter.) Martin proves this pretty ably because in the three examples of Northeast IPAs he offers, one is from San Diego. It's not an old trend there. Those small New England breweries didn't even drive a palate shift in Portland, Maine, so I have a hard time believing they drove one in Portland, Oregon.

Certainly a fair point, and Alworth goes on to try and break down the trend to it's constituent parts: American Hops, Flavor, and IBUs. It's here that I think his argument doesn't really capture what's going on in the New Guard of Northeast, though his points are part of it and are also more widespread than just the Northeast (I left a comment on Jeff's blog that covers some of the below.)

That one time I poured Heady Topper into a glass, what a rebel I am

To my mind, the whole trend culminating with the likes of Heady Topper (et al.) started with Greg Noonan at the Vermont Pub and Brewery in the 1990s. It's true that the Northeast is not a monolith and Alworth accurately pins down the old-school Northeastern style as "English-inflected, balanced, and notably malty beers" (think Hop Devil). However, beers like Bombay Grab IPA were precursors to what we're seeing today. Noonan alone was quite influential in the brewing world, having authored several books and just plain helped lots of other brewers.

Yes, American hops, dry hopping, and less bittering hops are part of the shift, but what I associate with the Northeast beers is yeast - Conan and other English strains that aren't as clean fermenting (i.e. they accentuate the fruitiness and juiciness of the hops) as the Chico American Ale stuff that drove so much of the West Coast IPA craze. Where did this come from? Greg Noonan.

Looking at the Northeast breweries listed above, there's also a tendency to use other adjuncts in place of something like crystal malt, so you get oats, wheat, maybe rye, and so on. The hops change with what's available, and a lot of breweries experiment with new or experimental hops, but when I started drinking IPAs (turn of the century timeframe), things seemed very different from the new guard of Northeast IPAs.

I'm not claiming causality here and can't speak to the influence of these beers outside the Northeast, but there's clearly something going on here that is more than just hop-driven. Heady Topper didn't happen by accident; John Kimmich worked for Greg Noonan. That's where he got the Conan yeast from. Heady was available in 2004, but it remained somewhat obscure until they started canning it. After that? you get an explosion of new breweries with a similar core approach.

Do all the Northeast Breweries take this approach? Of course not! But that doesn't mean there isn't a trend. Do some folks take the approach too far? Ah, now this is the next part of the controversy. Witness Jamil Zainasheff on Twitter:

I'm sorry, you who think this is acceptable beer have lost your minds. This overly yeasty crap is offensive. pic.twitter.com/TTTrT3nbhi

— Jamil Zainasheff (@mrmalty) March 2, 2016

And now we come to what is termed the "Milkshake IPA"; beers that are so cloudy that they barely look like a beer (interestingly, the beer that so offended Zainasheff looks pretty middle of the road in this respect). Part of this is the old-school BJCP emphasis on clarity in beer. It's true, a clear beer sure looks pretty in the glass. But as a result of using low flocculation yeast, starchy adjuncts like wheat or oats, and excessive dry hopping, you get a beer whose flavors are great, but which can appear hazy or worse (Ed gets into it more here).

For some reason, this really gets on some people's nerves. Which is fine! No one is forcing you to drink all the Hill Farmstead and those of us who enjoy their generally limited beer will thank you for leaving more for us. Instead, we just get a lot of whining. A few months ago, one of the Alstrom Bros (of Beer Advocate fame) visited Tired Hands and gave this review to HopHands:

Not feeling it with this brew, extremely cloudy and a mess to say the least. Staff at the pub should not be pouring it. Milkshake beers are not a trend or acceptable with traditional or even modern styles... No excuses. Carbonation seemed off, a muddled mess.

Yikes! In typical Tired Handsian fashion, Jean responded by putting out a series of "Milkshake" beers. IPAs brewed in their typical style, but with added lactose and usually some sort of high-pectin fruit puree in order to really amp up the cloudiness factor. I'm not positive about all of the beers in the series, but I know the recently released canned variety, Strawberry Milkshake IPA, also used wheat flour(!) for that extra turbid look:

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Now, I can see why this particular pour might not be your thing, but it was absolutely delicious! Knowing the context, I think the appearance is perfectly cromulent (especially given how good it tastes). Most of the beers in question don't actually look like this, except maybe Hoof Hearted... and, um, look what they named their brewery! Those are clearly people who don't care what you think. But even standard Tired Hands IPAs can be pretty hazy, and this group of Northeast brewers all seem to have a taste for such beer. When visiting Tired Hands one time a couple years ago, Jean filled a couple of growlers and gave them to a customer who was making a trip to Hill Farmstead. Since Sean Hill apparently likes his beer cloudy, Jean renamed "Communication is the Key" to "Communication is the Murky" and "We Are All Infinite Energy Vibrating At The Same Frequency" to "We Are All Hazy As Hell Vibrating at the Same Cloudiness".

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I think that's another thing worth noting about this whole Northeast phenomenon - these guys all know each other. They collaborate, they swap beers, they're clearly feeding off of one another. The Bros have rated some other beers with similar comments (one I noticed a while back was Trillium Vicinity), so they're clearly bugged by hazy beer. I guess it's possible to get a bad pour. I mean, according to Untappd, I've had well over 300 checkins at Tired Hands, and I've never gotten something that was unintentionally milkshakey. Very hazy? Certainly. But nothing like the Milkshake beers (which, again, were made with tongue firmly in cheek).

Incidentally, I have no idea what beer Jamil Zainasheff was talking about above. This is becoming a bit of a pet peeve for me. People like to whine about "bad breweries" and "offensive" beers, but it seems like they rarely ever actually name names. I mean, I'm sure these things exist, but it's hard to accept your hot take if you won't actually tell us what you're talking about. Strawman arguments are bad enough even when you name the strawman. At least the Bros are clear.

But I digress and I have rambled on for far too long. My ultimate points are that the Northeast IPA appears to be more than just hop-based (yeast and starchy adjuncts seem to play a big role), there is a long tradition with traceable influence, and you know, drink what you like. I happen to have no problem with this trend. If you do, more power to you, but maybe tone down the rhetoric a bit. As for a causal relationship with newfangled Oregon beer, I have no idea. Cloudy beer is certainly not a new thing, even in Oregon, but part of the point is that it's not necessarily the cloudiness that defines Northeast IPA. That's just a symptom of the way these folks are brewing.

Or maybe I'm full of it. As mentioned yesterday, comments are working again, so feel free to register your disgust (assuming you have a Google, Wordpress, etc... account). What say you? I made this post too long didn't I? None of you are actually reading this, are you? I'm the worst. Or the Würst. Are you still here or not? What's going on? Get off my lawn! Or no, wait, leave a comment. So it's getting late and I'm obviously getting loopy, so I'll stop now. Or will I? No, I will. I just haven't yet. Annnnd scene!

Now comes the time of year when we attempt to divine information about the time past and times to come, all based on the relative positions of celestial objects. In other words, we all become astrologists around the new year! I'm making light of this, but it's a good thing to take stock of where we are and where we're going from time to time, and completing another orbit around the sun is as good a time as any. This isn't really the place for personal reflections, but it is a place for beer! So let's get down to the year in beer that was, and perhaps look forward to what the future holds.

It was a good year! I drank lots of great beer, made lots of new friends, and even got interviewed. 2016 has a lot to live up to, but also plenty of opportunity.

Looking at the past few year end musings (jeeze, has it been 5 years? Yikes.) I tend to get repetitive on my reflections, so I'll try to limit these observations to relatively new stuff rather than just repeating that yes, I've aged some beer, and while I've had a couple of revalations, most of it was just as good fresh (see how I squeezed that one in there? I may not be so successful at this.)

• Beer Festivals - I've never been a huge fan of beer festivals for reasons I have already belabored in my recap of Operation Chowder, a trip in which I attended the American Craft Beer Festival in Boston. I only went to one session (Friday night), and had a great time, but felt no regret that the other sessions were sold out. Likewise, I had a fine time at the more local Kennet Brewfest, but I only went to it because someone had an extra ticket. I mean, it's fine, but 95% of the beer flowing there was generally available in the area anyway. I think I enjoyed ACBF more because there were so many New England breweries that I'd never had before that were there. As such, I may loosen my disdain for festivals... when traveling. GABF, here I come? Let's not get carried away.
• Bottle Shares - I have often posted about Beer Club, but that's generally a low key affair. This year, I connected with a more formal local group that has very cool bottle shares, ones that I haven't really posted much about (though I have mentioned them). I would expect this to continue, because I enjoy not documenting every beer I drink, and honestly, writing a full review based on a 2 ounce sample after having sampled 10 other beers really isn't the best way to do it. Plus, you know, it's rude. Look for a tweet here or there, but otherwise, these shares will remain just plain old fun. Alright, fine, based on this and my beer festivals, I might add a supplementary list of beers I loved, but only had small samples of below.
• Taking a Break - For two years in a row, I've basically given up beer for Lent. I find it to be a very good chance to reset and recalibrate, not to mention the benefit to my waistline. Plus, I get a chance to focus on other things like Bourbon, Scotch, Wine, and Tea. It's now something I actually look forward to every year. This starts in early February this year, so look for a shift in blogging material in a month or so...
• Wales, bro - I've often talked about slaying personal white whale beers, things that aren't particularly rare, but which I'd never managed to snag before. This year was the first year I actually slayed true beer nerd walez, that ridiculous list of absurdly rare beers. In each case, it wasn't something I realized until after I drank the beer in question (usually lucking into it by accident), and to me, that's the way to do it. I feel like intentionally hunting down beers on that list would be quite annoying. Then again, I guess that's why they call them wales, bro. Regardless, I'm happy I got to try those beers, and one of them was my favorite beer of the year (see below!) so maybe the list isn't complete bullshit.
• Style Parity - Alright, this is not really true at all, but after last year's American Wild Ale dominated top 40, this year's list is at least a little more diverse. A lot of this is just the natural ebbs and flows of availability and the degrees to which I'm willing to hunt stuff down. Part of it is also more of a willingness to branch out. Heck, I even listed a Pilsner on this year's top 40. A Pilsner! Will wonders ever cease?
• Blogging Plateau - I'm still blogging at a pretty good clip, but I feel like I've reached a nice 2-3 posts a week cadence that I don't really want to exceed much anymore. There was a time when 4-6 posts a week were common, but those days have past, and I'd expect things to continue on the slower pace. After all, it's nice to drink something without having to write about it, and I've long since gotten over the compulsion to post about literally every beer I've tried.
• Other Stuff - Of the normal topics, I have little to say. I had a terrible year in homebrewing, so I'm going to try and turn that around in 2016. Ratings inflation continues unabated. I keep meaning to inaugurate a new class of A+ beers, and I guess 2016 is the year for that. I've actually been drinking a bunch of aged beers recently, and plan on posting about them in more detail in the nearish future.

A pretty interesting year, and it's fun to see how my beer nerdery is progressing. So here's my list of top 40 beers I've tried this year. The list is limited to beers I had and reviewed this year, so if you don't see your favorites on the list, don't get all wound up about it. I've either had it in a previous year or just didn't catch up with it. Or, I had it and hated it, because you're the worst. How could you like such a horrid thing? But I digress. This is, of course, an entirely arbitrary exercise, but I always have fun with lists. Lists are American. What are you? A communist? There I go digressing again. I tried to limit breweries to a handful of entries, but whatever, it's my list and I'll do what I want. Speaking of which, let's do this:

1. Drie Fonteinen Hommage (2007) (Lambic)
2. Crooked Stave Nightmare On Brett (Leopold Bros. Whiskey Barrel-Aged) (American Wild Ale)
3. Tired Hands Pathway of Beauty (IPA)
4. Allagash Cuvée D'Industrial (American Wild Ale)
5. Alchemist Focal Banger (IPA)
6. Firestone Walker XIX - Anniversary Ale (American Strong Ale)
7. Midnight Sun Arctic Devil (Barleywine)
8. Tired Hands Freedom From the Known (Saison)
9. Logsdon Peche 'n Brett (Saison)
10. Pizza Boy Golden Sour (American Wild Ale)
11. Hangar 24 Barrel Roll No. 3 Pugachev's Cobra (Imperial Stout)
12. The Bruery Cuir (Old Ale)
13. Firestone Walker XVIII - Anniversary Ale (American Strong Ale)
14. Goose Island Bourbon County Vanilla Rye (Imperial Stout)
15. Allagash Farm To Face (American Wild Ale)
16. Trillium Congress Street IPA (IPA)
17. Jack's Abby Vanilla Barrel Aged Framinghammer (Baltic Porter)
18. Avery Uncle Jacob's Stout (Imperial Stout)
19. Lawson's Finest Liquids Sip Of Sunshine (Double IPA)
20. Forest & Main Moeder Seizoen (Saison)
21. Hill Farmstead Society & Solitude #4 (Double IPA)
22. Lost Abbey Cuvée De Tomme (American Wild Ale)
23. Almanac Dogpatch Sour (American Wild Ale)
24. BFM XV (√225 Saison) (Saison)
25. Alpine Nelson (IPA)
26. Stone Southern Charred (2014) (American Strong Ale)
27. Midnight Sun Berserker (Imperial Stout)
28. Crux Tough Love [Banished] (Imperial Stout)
29. Prairie Pirate Noir (Imperial Stout)
30. Victory Java Cask (Imperial Stout)
31. Forest & Main Rum Barrel-Aged Gmork (Imperial Stout)
32. Lost Nation Lamoille Bretta (Saison)
33. Telegraph Gypsy Ale (American Wild Ale)
34. Sante Adairius Jose Pimiento (American Wild Ale)
35. Modern Times Monsters' Park (Imperial Stout)
36. Pivovar Kout Koutská 12° Dvanáctka (Czech pilsener)
37. AleSmith Vietnamese Coffee Speedway Stout (Imperial Stout)
38. Grassroots Brother Soigné (Saison)
39. Lost Nation The Wind (Gose)
40. Kern River Just Outstanding IPA (IPA)

The Unreviewed 5
Beers that where I had small samples, never wrote a review, but an impression was made regardless.

• Lawson's Finest Liquids Triple Sunshine IPA
• The Rare Barrel Ensorcelled
• AleSmith Speedway Stout - Vietnamese Coffee (Bourbon Barrel Aged)
• Other Half Chardonnay Barrel Aged Brett Saison
• Bullfrog Le Roar Grrrz Blueberry

I need to find a way to get more of each of these. Yum

So it's been a great year, and hopefully 2016 has even more in store for me. Cheers!

The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. You can find more information on The Session on Brookston Beer Bulletin.

I've sporadically participated in "The Session" many times over the years, but this is the first time I've hosted. Many thanks to those who took the time to put together a post on this month's chosen topic, a "Double Feature", wherein participants drank two beers, compared and contrasted, and maybe even paired with some form of media for extra credit. Let's check out your responses:

First up, Sara Q. Thompson takes on two Imperial Stouts made with coffee that were aged between 1.5 and 2 years. Coffee is one of those ingredients that tends to fall off over time, so this is certainly an interesting approach. For the media pairing, it Sara points to the Taster's Choice Gold Blend saga, a series of flirtatious coffee commercials (And she's in good company: Stanley Kubrick was apparently fascinated by the storytelling economy in coffee commercials, and would recut them to make them even more concise.)

Next, Sara's husband Mark Lindner went British, pairing two Samuel Smith Organic beers with the last two episodes of Doctor Who Series 2 [reboot, David Tennant]. I have to say, that pale ale doesn't look pale at all, and from the sounds of it, it wasn't particularly fresh, which is a pity. "So the moral, I guess, is old TV shows are OK to visit for either the first time or to revisit, as the case may be, but other than the beers-that-can-be-aged most beers should not be."

The Beer Nut has some choice words for celebrity chefs and their bumbling attempts at beer tie-ins. "It's always mediocre, lowest-common-denominator, beer for people who aren't especially interested in beer." J'accuse! Will Kevin Dundon's pair of beers, brewed "round the back of his posh country house hotel", break down The Beer Nut's cynicism? Or will they be the same bland, uninspired stuff of most celebrity chef fare? Only one way to find out, and along the way, we're treated to some thoughts on beer and food pairing as well.

Gary Gillman over at Beer et seq. busts out "two beers, both lagers, yet different as can be." Unimpressed with each, he takes to blending the two together to see if a more harmonious brew results, always an interesting exercise.

Derrick Peterman at Ramblings of a Beer Runner strains our premise to near its breaking point by drinking a pair of Ciders. Ciders! Actually, I love that he went far afield on this one, and I learned that ciders are more of "a study in subtleties". Plus, Derrick perfectly captures what I was going for when I chose my topic:

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for crystal ball gazing, thinking deeply on esoteric beer concepts, or waxing philosophical on beer culture. But I love his Session topic harks back to an earlier, simpler time of The Session, where the idea was let's all drink a beer and talk about it. Maybe too many topics only a hard core beer geek could possibly care about, let alone write about, was a big part of why The Session was almost no more.

Indeed, and I'm happy my topic seemed to have the intended effect.

Tom Bedell recalls previous beer duos and then devises some of the most excellent movie pairings for those beers that I've seen (certainly the best of this Session!) Filmic choices range from Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry, to Anchorman, Rocky, and even Sophie's Choice (that last a particularly good choice when rating two great beers). The movie nerd in me adores this post. Well done Tom!

The Brew Site's Jon Abernathy also picks up on my purpose for the topic, noting recent higher-concept sessions and calling this one a homecoming of sorts. To celebrate, Jon picks up two canned, hop-driven session beers, one a hoppy saison, the other a straight up session IPA. Both sound great!

Sean Inman at Beer Search Party surveys a pair of Victory beers, going for a sorta old-school East Coast IPA battle I guess. I like how Headwaters has morphed from an American Pale Ale to a "Quasi-Session IPA" because that's basically what a Session IPA is anyway. While he's at it, he dissects the can designs as well. For the movie pairing, he picks a duo of Steve Jobs bio-picks and laments the lack of available suds at movie theaters (dear Alamo Draft House, if you're reading, please open theaters in LA and Philadelphia, thank you.)

A Good Beer Blog's Alan McLeod has done this. He's done this a lot. Over a decade ago. In fact, he points to a couple of quadruple features and a triple feature before settling on an actual double feature (interesting tidbit, I'm pretty sure that's my buddy Mike correcting the location of Victory brewing on that IPA post, heh). He mentions these exercises were helpful in trying to "figure out my own lexicon of tastes and descriptions", and that's my recollection as well. Bonus: we get another round in Alan's ongoing feud with Oliver Gray. Delicious.

Finally, your humble host contributed a pair of entries of his own. One welcoming Almanac to Pennsylvania, the other a more harmonious combination of beer and movies, a tribute to Wes Craven. And I'm sure I'll continue to play with such things in the future, so stay tuned!

Also of note, Boak and Baily didn't get a chance to put together a post for this session, but as it turns out, they were already embroiled in a series of posts on Bottled Milds that actually seems appropriate. This one even compares a canned mild versus the same beer in a bottle. That is a great double feature, if you ask me!

And that just about covers it. If I missed you or if you want to be a little late to the party, feel free to send your post to me via email at mciocco at gmail dot com or hit me up on twitter @KaedrinBeer (apologies again for the misbehaving comment system I have in this antiquated blog).

Next up for The Session, while not officially announced just yet, appears to be Holiday Beers, hosted by one of the founders of the Session, Jay at Brookston Beer Bulletin.

Update: Added another entry from Beer Search Party...

The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. You can find more information on The Session on Brookston Beer Bulletin.

Update: The Session has come and gone, and the roundup of participants has been posted!

After last month's brief existential crisis, I volunteered to host a Session. It appears I was not alone, and perhaps this little setback was just what we needed to put a swift end to any doubts about the endurance of the Session. We've got at least 9 months of sessions scheduled out, and I'm sure more will carry the torch when the time comes.

For this installment, I'd like to revisit that glorious time of beer drinking when I was just starting to realize what I was getting into. One of my favorite ways to learn about beer was to do comparative tastings. Drink two beers (usually of the same style) with a critical eye, compare and contrast. Because I'm also a movie nerd, this would often be accompanied by a film pairing. It was fun, and I still enjoy doing such things to this day!

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to drink two beers, compare and contrast. No need for slavish tasting notes, but if you want to, that's fine too. The important part is to highlight how the two beers interact with one another during your session (pun intended!) For extra credit, pair your beers with two films to make your own Double Feature. Now, I'm a big tent kinda guy, so feel free to stretch this premise to its breaking point. The possibilities are endless!

• Drink two beers of the same style, pair with a double feature of horror movies (it being October and all - it's what I'll be doing!)
• Drink two vintages of the same beer, pair with a famous double album (The White Album, The Wall, Exile on Main Street, etc...)
• Throw caution to the wind and do a triple feature!
• Drink a base beer and its barrel aged variant, pair with two episodes of your favorite TV show.
• Actually, lots of other types of variants out there too: base beer and it's Brett-dosed counterpart, base and a fruited variant, base and spiced variant, base and a dry hopped variant, many possibilities here... Pair with video games.
• Play master blender by taking two beers, tasting both, then blending them together in the perfect proportion for the ultimate whatever. Then say nuts to pairing it with non-beer stuff, because you're just that cool.
• Test your endurance by taking down two bottles of Black Tuesday solo, then documenting the resultant trip to the emergency room*.
• Recount a previous comparative tasting experience that proved formative.
• Drink a fresh IPA and a six-month old IPA and discuss where you fall on the "Freshness Fetish" scale.
• Drink a beer and compare with wine or bourbon or coke or whatever strikes your fancy. One should probably be beer though. I said "big tent" not "no tent"...
• "These two beers are in my fridge, I should probably drink them or something." (Pair with leftovers.)
• Drink a beer and a homebrewed clone of that beer (an obscure one that requires you to have both readily available, but this is part of the fun!)
• Hold a March Madness style beer tournament, pitting beer versus beer in a series of brackets in order to determine the supreme winner.
• Devise a two course beer dinner, pairing two beers with various foodstuffs.
• If any of you people live near an Alamo Drafthouse, I think you know what you need to do. Do it for me; I don't have the awesomeness that is Alamo anywhere near me and wish to live vicariously through your sublime double feature.
• Collect an insane amount of barleywines and drink them with your friends, making sure to do the appropriate statistical analysis of everyone's ratings.
• Go to a bar, have your friends choose two beers for you, but make sure they don't tell you what the beers are. Compare, contrast, guess what they are, and bask in the glory of blind tasting.
• Lecture me on the evils of comparative tasting and let me have it with both barrels. We'll love you for it, but you're probably wrong.

Truly, there are a plethora of ways to take this, so hop to it!

To participate, simply write up a recap of your double feature, post it on or around November 6, and send it to me at mciocco at gmail dot com. You can try to leave a comment on this post, but my commenting system is borked pretty hardcore at this point (you fancy schmancy Wordpress bloggers should be fine, but Google/Blogger dropped support for my current platform). I will try to fix it in time for the session, but to be safe, just email me or drop me a line on twitter @KaedrinBeer. My plan is to post the recap on Sunday, November 8, so don't feel bad about posting on Saturday or Sunday if Friday is too busy for ya! Have fun, and be safe!

* Kaedrin does not endorse this suggestion, which was only included as a satirical aside and not meant to be taken seriously. If, on the other hand, you'd like to pit Black Tuesday versus Pugachev's Cobra, that would be awesome**.

** Awesome, but also not endorsed. This was only included as a satirical aside to make the previous asterisked point more palatable and because I enjoy footnotes within footnotes, don't you?

Update: The Session has come and gone, and the roundup of participants has been posted!

The beer nerd world gets worked up about things on a regular basis. Today, it's the whole Lagunitas sell-out thing, which, yes, has an ironic component given the deranged ramblings of their owner in the past. But I'm sorry, I just can't get worked up about it. I've got too much beer to drink, not to mention all the other stuff going on in my life. Here's a few other things I could care less about:

• Pumpkin Beer in July! Every year with these people. Yeah, it's faintly ridiculous that a big, heavy, spicy fall beer shows up on shelves in July, and no, I don't want to drink one whilst embroiled in a humid heat wave. That's why I don't buy pumpkin beers in July! No one is forcing you to buy them and there's plenty of other stuff on the shelves. We're drowning in a glorious deluge of great, varied beer these days. I can't get worked up about pumpkin beer showing up a little early.
• The definition of Craft! Dear lord, why? It's fermented sugar water, and it's delicious. That's pretty much all I need. Look, I enjoy pedantic labeling exercises as much as the next guy, and if you want to see me rant about what the hell constitutes a saison, I'll go on about it for hours. That is something I can get worked up about, for some reason. But "craft" is basically meaningless to me, no matter how you define it. I'm sure I've used the term on here before, but the thing is, you probably understood what I was talking about without needing to delve into how many barrels a given brewer puts out in a year. Language is sometimes ephemeral, and I have a hard time getting worked up about the definition of craft. In certain contexts (i.e. if I worked for a trade organization dedicated to a certain group of brewers), I'm sure it's super important, but I don't exist in such a context.
• Malty and Hoppy are lazy descriptions! And yet, non-beer-nerds seem to get it right away when I use those words. When I say biscuity or bready, they turn their head at me the way a cat looks at their owner when the food bowl is empty. I'm not trying to dumb it down or condescend, but I also don't want to lecture someone on the minutiae of malt and hops unless they're genuinely interested. My brother could care less about this stuff, but if I tell him something is hoppy or an IPA or something, he gets the picture and runs in the other direction. That's all he wants, and I'm not going to force feed him information on hop terroir and the flavor wheel and my personal system for ranking how dank a beer's hops are. I generally don't use these broad words here when writing tasting notes, but occasionally one slips out, and I simply can't get worked up about it.

None of these things are ridiculous, of course, and obviously these are popular topics to write about, I just can't get worked up about them. This perhaps explains my modest traffic here, as I rarely come down hard on a given controversy. In fact, for a guy who sez he can't get worked up over this stuff, I just wrote a bunch about it, so um. Hey, look below, beer!

What do I get worked up about? Beer! Here's a few things I've had recently that I didn't take notes about because I was hanging out with friends, new and old, and didn't want to bury my nose in my phone because I'm not a total jerk.

(Click to Embiggen)

I went to a local beer collective's bottle share recently and met a whole slew of new beer friends. A good time was had by all, and the bottles were pretty impressive. I didn't take notes, but a few did stand out:

That's Alesmith Bourbon Barrel Aged Speedway Stout, which was spectacular (despite my legendary indifference to coffee) and de Garde Yer Bu, a delicious little Berliner Weiss that clocks in at a measly 2.5% ABV. Also of note was Tuckahoe Marigolden, an obscure NJ brewery making a pretty darn solid American Wild Ale. Literally everything else that was at there share was great too, but those were the standouts.

Speaking of sharing, a friend was over recently and I decided to share some of the haul from my trade with Jay of the most excellent Beer Samizdat blog. This was a quite dank, powerful little DIPA, it felt like a light barleywine with a little age on it, quite nice.

At a local beeratorium, I spied this Tilquin Gueuze Squared. Apparently created by accident when they inadvertently over-carbonated a bunch of bottles. They gave it some more time in barrels before rebottling, but that meant that the ABV had risen a bit higher than normal. Perhaps not better than your typical Tilquin Gueuze, but a happy accident nonetheless, and quite delicious!

I've sung this underrated beer's praises before, and while it's not going to blow your head off, it's a great little pale ale, citrusy and quaffable. Worth checking out, and if you see Double Duckpin, definitely go for it!

On the first Friday of every month, there's a beer blog roundup called The Session. Someone picks a topic, and everyone blogs about it. This time around, Allen Huerta wants to speculate on the landscape of beer:

Our topic this month is, "The Landscape of Beer". How do you see that landscape now? What about in 5, 10, or even 20 years? A current goal in the American Craft Beer Industry is 20% market share by the year 2020. How can we get there? Can we get there?

Whether your view is realistic or whimsical, what do you see in our future? Is it something you want or something that is happening? Let us know and maybe we can help paint the future together.

That's a pretty open ended topic, so I'm just going to wank about booms and busts for a while.

I've been thinking about this lately because it seems to be an inevitable fact of society, impacting everything from financial markets to petty cultural artifacts to, yes, beer. Hardly a unique insight that I'm sure we've all noticed, from time to time. This time, it was kicked off by Stephen Thompson (of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour) talking about how he fell in love with country music because he was forced to listen to it whilst working at a grocery story in the late 80s. Like most of us, his initial attitude was that country music was garbage, but in being subjected to it over time, he found himself discovering a whole cadre of artists that he fell in love with (Keith Whitley, Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle, K.D. Lang, Lyle Lovett, &c.) I guess life is good when you're discovering new music and singing along whilst toiling away in the milk cooler (apparently good acoustics in there). Later in life, he met Lyle Lovett, who speculated as to why that particular era of country was so fruitful:

I actually got a chance to talk to [Lyle Lovett] about the state of country radio in the late 80s, during this time when I was listening to it, and he was explaining that the reason so much of this stuff got on the air was because country radio was, country music was, commercially, in this huge slump and so the labels were throwing all sorts of weird things at the wall to see what would stick. And near the end of my time at the grocery store... Garth Brooks broke big and made country music incredibly, culturally powerful again. And then all these very mainstream country singers came up behind him and pushed all the Lyle Lovetts and K.D. Langs and Steve Earles and Dwight Yoakams off of the radio.

I know approximately nothing about country music, so I have no idea how valid this is, but we've all seen this pattern so many times that I have no trouble believing it. These days, much of the music he's talking about probably wouldn't even be classified as country.

But I digress, this ain't no music blog. In listening to that story, I was immediately struck by the parallels to booze. I don't know how proud of that I should be, but booze most certainly goes through regular booms and busts. Some of these are easier to parse than others. Bourbon seems to have a pretty clear cycle. There's a very inelastic supply chain in the whiskey business because it takes so long to produce and because there's such wild variability from barrel to barrel. Not long ago, there was a bit of a bust in the industry, which meant that stocks of aged whiskey were high and demand was low. This drove down price and drove up quality, and lead to insane things like Pappy Van Winkle going on a bourbon message board and begging people to buy his whiskey. For $20 a bottle. Is your head exploding yet? A decade after that post, and Pappy is impossible to find and going for $100+ a bottle (retail - on the secondary market, multiply by 10). This is a drastic simplification of the situation, of course, but it's pretty clear that bourbon was a bust not that long ago, and is booming right now, in part because the conditions of the bust formed a virtuous loop and created better product which lead to a resurgence amongst drinkers. Now? Age statements are disappearing, quality hooch is impossible to purchase, and industry giants are glomming onto cheap tactics like flavored whiskey, etc... Is another bust approaching? I don't really know. As cyclical as these things are, they can also happen over the course of decades, which makes prediction a little more difficult.

So we come to beer (finally!) We're pretty clearly in boom times for beer. The brewery count is fast approaching 4000. This is up from, um, 89 breweries in 1978, the year of my birth. What happened? In my lifetime, we've gone from a massively consolidated industry to an explosion of tiny, niche brewers. Prohibition certainly had an impact, but post-prohibition our world became enamored with what Thomas Pynchon calls the "American vice of modular repetition". Revolutions in manufacturing and transportation lead to dramatic consolidation across all industries. This sort of thing is great for winning wars (digression incoming: The German Tiger tank was dramatically superior to the US Sherman, but the Germans only made approximately 1,300 of their tank. The US made over 30,000 Shermans.) but bad for consumer choice. The mid-century ideal of beer seemed to be mass-produced light lager (the fizzy yellow stuff we're all familiar with). Who needs variety when you can produce something bland that sells in massive quantities?

The problem is that, to paraphrase Howard Moskowitz, there is no such thing as the perfect beer, only perfect beers (plural). I've written about Moskowitz before:

Howard Moskowitz... was a market research consultant with various food industry companies that were attempting to optimize their products. After conducting lots of market research and puzzling over the results, Moskowitz eventually came to a startling conclusion: there is no perfect product, only perfect products. Moskowitz made his name working with spaghetti sauce. Prego had hired him in order to find the perfect spaghetti sauce (so that they could compete with rival company, Ragu). Moskowitz developed dozens of prototype sauces and went on the road, testing each variety with all sorts of people. What he found was that there was no single perfect spaghetti sauce, but there were basically three types of sauce that people responded to in roughly equal proportion: standard, spicy, and chunky. At the time, there were no chunky spaghetti sauces on the market, so when Prego released their chunky spaghetti sauce, their sales skyrocketed. A full third of the market was underserved, and Prego filled that need.

Decades later, this is hardly news to us and the trend has spread from the supermarket into all sorts of other arenas. In entertainment, for example, we're seeing a move towards niches. The era of huge blockbuster bands like The Beatles is coming to an end. Of course, there will always be blockbusters, but the really interesting stuff is happening in the niches. This is, in part, due to technology. Once you can fit 30,000 songs onto an iPod and you can download "free" music all over the internet, it becomes much easier to find music that fits your tastes better. Indeed, this becomes a part of peoples' identity. Instead of listening to the mass produced stuff, they listen to something a little odd and it becomes an expression of their personality. You can see evidence of this everywhere, and the internet is a huge enabler in this respect. The internet is the land of niches. Click around for a few minutes and you can easily find absurdly specific, single topic, niche websites like this one where every post features animals wielding lightsabers or this other one that's all about Flaming Garbage Cans In Hip Hop Videos (there are thousands, if not millions of these types of sites). The internet is the ultimate paradox of choice, and you're free to explore almost anything you desire, no matter how odd or obscure it may be (see also, Rule 34).

The parallels are obvious. Moskowitz was doing this research in the 80s, which was when beer was starting its slow rebound, as was nearly every other business that had gone down that mass-produced, industrial scale path. Now we're dealing with the reverse problem of the Paradox of Choice.

There were lots of forces at work. I don't think it's an accident that the brewery count started to rebound not long after homebrewing was legalized (not coincidentally, also in 1978). Correlation does not imply causation, but a bajillion brewers claiming they got their start at home does. Consumer willingness to try new things, to actually appreciate what they were eating and drinking, also helped. It took a few decades for beer to rebound. There were hiccups, like the late 90s bubble of rampant speculation, but they were mere speedbumps, and now we're in an almost comically absurd period of growth.

The driving force behind the early 20th century was industrialization and consolidation. The driving force behind craft beer (and all the other industries I talked about above) is actually marketing and diversification. Which is funny, because marketing is an anathema to most beer nerds.

This boom can't last forever. It's one thing to replace mass-produced lager with some full flavored options like IPAs and Stouts. The market was underserved by fizzy yellow stuff, and small, independent breweries filled that need. Other niches have been filled out, Belgian styles became a big thing, wheat beers, and so on. Nowadays, we've hit a bit of a threshold when it comes to variety. IPAs filled a growing need, but smoked goat brain beers? People drank it, for sure, but that might even be too small of a market segment to be called a niche.

That being said, I don't see a slowdown coming anytime soon. The next 5-10 years will probably follow the previous 5-10 years in terms of overall growth, but some strain will start to show. Brewers will start to retire, leaving their brewery's future uncertain. We'll see some consolidation. The emergence of macro-craft, as regional powerhouses continue to grow, which might lead to further consolidation. There's certainly backlash when AB-Inbev purchases a brewery, but will there be a backlash when Stone or Victory or Sierra Nevada buys a brewery? Given the way Duvel's acquisitions have gone, I'm betting not.

But uber-local breweries continue to thrive, often simply because they exist within the local community. A very large proportion of those 4000 breweries are tiny little brewpubs that service a relatively small area. I don't see that changing in the near term.

It's hard to predict the future, but there are warning signs. We really haven't reached important thresholds in a lot of these, but they are happening. Prices are creeping upwards, snobbery is on the rise, beer as a thing to invest in or trade is becoming more common. But none have really reached epidemic or truly harmful levels. People often talk about bubbles, but the insidious thing about bubbles is that they're only easy to identify in retrospect. A steep increase in price might be a sign, but look at high-end Bordeaux wines? They used to be had for $20 a bottle, and now they're over $100 and some approach $1000. And we complain about $10 pints of Hopslam. Wine snobbery seems more prevalent than beer snobbery. Beer cellaring is a thing, but it doesn't even come close to wine cellaring.

It's hard to look at a bottle of wine going from $50 to $700 over a short period of time and not think a bubble is forming, and yet, here we are, several years later, and that $700 bottle has no problem selling (by the case). Booms eventually bust and bubbles eventually burst. Other factors will certainly come into play. The economy as a whole goes through its own booms and busts, much more regularly than booze. Beer will decline at some point, but it's also a matter of degree. It won't decline into irrelevance, and I can't see it reaching the dark days of 1978, but even if it does, it will rebound. It always does. Boom and bust is a cycle, and the bust is usually followed by some sort of boom. How tasty will that boom be? Savor it now, because we're already there.

Update: Allen has posted the round up of all Session posts. Of particular note is Dan from Community Beer Works, who wrote a post as if from the future of 2035, where IPA is a throwback style and brewers are named Phineas. I liked Sean from Beer Search Party's post as well, though I thought it was funny that he sez "Whales and snobs are on the downswing as well" (something I had identified on the upswing above). Obviously, the other posts are worth your time too. Thanks again to Allen for hosting.

Here at Kaedrin, we're big fans of FiftyFifty's Eclipse series of imperial stouts aged in various whiskey barrels. The idea is that you start with the same base beer but age it in different expressions of bourbon and rye. Since the aging period is the same (about 6 months), the only real variable here is the different expressions of whiskey (and the myriad variables that apply to each barrel). In my experience, this has produced some modest but definitely noticeable differences in the resulting beers. For instance, my two favorite expressions of 2012 were the Rittenhouse Rye (very rich and caramelly, oak forward) and Elijah Craig 12 (more roast from the base was retained here, but it's also got a nice richness to it). Then there were a couple that sorta fell between those two in terms of the amount of roast retained after the barrel character. From the most recent batch, I had the super bourbon forward (but not as oaky) Evan Williams 23 Year and the more chocolaty Woodford Reserve. And so on.

The problem with all this? I was drinking all these beers on separate occasions. Could I simply be making up all these differences? The only way to really tell would be to try them all together... but who can put down several bombers of 11.9% ABV stout in one sitting? Look, I've drank some heavy hitters in a single session more times than I should admit, but taking on several Eclipse bottles solo just ain't realistic. So earlier this year, I resolved to gather as many variants as I could, then hold a comparative tasting and spread the wealth with a bunch of friends. As such, this happened:

That's six variants, split across five tasters. Each taster ranked the beers from 6 down to 1 (with 6 being the best and 1 being the worst) based on approximately 4 ounces per variant. 24 ounces per person is much more approachable than 132 ounces. The general methodology was semi-blind. The bottles don't actually say which bourbon barrels were used, but you can determine the provenance by looking up the wax color. I'm the only person in the group of five who knew anything about that, so I figured that was blind enough.

It was way more difficult to differentiate than I thought it would be. This could be for any number of reasons. We're about 8 months after release, so their distinctive natures may have mellowed out some. Lord knows my basement ain't exactly the most controlled cellaring environment, which might also have had an impact. Also, much of my memory of these beers comes from the 2012 variants, which were 9% ABV. This year's batch clocks in at 11.9% ABV, which is significantly different. Add in the inherent unpredictability of barrel aging, and you've got some more factors there. Plus, we sampled a few other things before the tasting proper started. I know, I'm the worst. I should totally have locked each attendee in a hermetically sealed room and forced them to sample the beers in absolute silence, but I didn't have the heart (or firepower) to do so.

Now, it wasn't impossible to detect differences, and indeed, I had a very clear favorite (Elijah Craig 12) and a very clear least-favorite (High West Bourbon). I kept going back and forth between Rittenhouse Rye and Buffalo Trace as my second favorite, and honestly, I could probably have thrown Four Roses in with those two as well. The High West Rye expression wasn't really there for me either (but hey, I'll drink a dram of Rendezvous Rye anytime guys). Of course, there were four other tasters, so here's the scientific ranking of these six Eclipse variants:

1. Buffalo Trace (4.8 avg score)
2. Four Roses (4.4 avg score)
3. Elijah Craig 12 (4.4 avg score)
4. Rittenhouse Rye (2.8 avg score)
5. High West Bourbon (2.6 avg score)
6. High West Rye (2.0 avg score)

Some things to consider here:

• Four Roses and Elijah Craig 12 tied for second place, but it's worth noting that EC12 had the highest Standard Deviation in the tasting (at 2.07) and Four Roses was somewhere on the lower end of the pack (1.34). So I slotted Four Roses in at #2.
• Speaking of Standard Deviation, the best of these were, perhaps not surprisingly, the worst and best beers. High West Rye has the lowest Standard Deviation with 0.71, while Buffalo Trace sported a respectable 1.1. So basically, no one particularly liked High West Rye, and pretty much everyone thought Buffalo Trace was good.
• One ballot could be said to be a slight outlier, in that they did seem to drive the two highest Standard Deviations. In one case, they rated Elijah Craig a 1 (other ratings were 6, 6, 5, and 4) and in the other, they rated High West Bourbon a 5 (other ratings were 1, 1, 3, 3). I also ended up ranking Rittenhouse Rye much higher than anyone else, but the effect wasn't as dramatic there. Otherwise we were generally in line with each other, which seems pretty good!
• No single variant got more than 2 of the highest rating (both Buffalo Trace and Elijah Craig accomplished that feat). Four Roses also garnered 1 of the highest rating. Rittenhouse Rye and the High West variants did not manage clear that bar.
• In terms of the lowest rating, only High West Bourbon managed to get 2 of those (which is why the outlier threw things off on this one).
• On the scoring sheet I made, I also listed out the bourbons in a random order to see if anyone could match the color to the bourbon. Two people got one of these correct, one person didn't even try, and the other person literally wrote "NFC" meaning "No Fucking Clue" (I already knew the answers, so didn't participate in that part).
• None of us are particularly accomplished whiskey drinkers, but one person said their absolute favorite bourbon was Four Roses, and they actually did end up pegging the Four Roses variant as their favorite. Way to go!
• None of the beers were considered actually bad, and everyone seemed to like all the variants. So the High West Stuff might not quite stack up to the rest, but they're still pretty good in the grand scheme of things...

Full data set is on Google Sheets and publicly viewable, in case you want to do your own number crunching.

It was a very fun evening, and a very interesting exercise too. If I were to do something like this again, I'd try to go for fresher bottles, and less variants, but even so, I was still pretty happy with the tasting.