Blind Tasting Results

Saturday was my long-awaited blind IPA tasting. Here's how it happened.

15 Oregon IPAs were procured. I chose to stick with Oregon beer to keep things stylistically similar.

I had about 10 folks attending, some of which hadn't really tasted beer critically in the past, and I was glad for the opportunity to preach the craft gospel.

The beers we served were as follows:

Oakshire Watershed IPA
Ninkasi Total Domination IPA
Hop Valley Alphadelic IPA
10 Barrel IPA
Rogue Brutal IPA
Breakside IPA
Burnside IPA
Flat Tail Rough Cut IPA
Mazama Hop Eruption IPA
Wild Ride Copperhead IPA
Laurelwood Workhorse IPA
McKenzie Twisted Meniscus IPA
Deschutes Inversion IPA
Hopworks IPA
Caldera Hop Hash IPA

The hosts and I devised a plan: flights of 4 samples each, picked and poured randomly by a tireless volunteer. At the end of each flight, after evaluating the beers, we were told which breweries were in the flight, and guessed which beer matched up with the tasting notes we'd written.

My tasting notes are quite revealing. I ranked each beer within its flight, best to worst.
So, my top beers from each flight: Hopworks, Rogue, Laurelwood, Burnside.
My bottom 4: Wild Ride, Breakside, Flat Tail, Deschutes.

Laurelwood being on the top doesn't surprise me; it's a wonderful IPA and I remember it tasting very hoppy even amidst all the other bitterness. Likewise Hopworks, I've enjoyed their IPA many times in the past. Burnside is surprising. I've been to their brewpub a few times, and my tasting notes from then don't seem to indicate their IPA as being especially good. Maybe my palate has changed or their recipe's improved. Rogue was also interesting to see on here; I don't visit them very often, but maybe I should be keeping closer tabs on their production.

The bottom 4 were also interesting to see. Wild Ride was a gamble; no one at the tasting had tried their IPA before, and it turned out to be lackluster. Breakside's surprising; I recall quite liking their IPA when I visited them a couple years ago. Flat Tail's in line with what I remember trying previously, and Deschutes is more of a malty, East-coast style IPA.

Here are a few things I learned for the next event:

- 15 beers is way too many to be able to meaningfully and critically evaluate. Palate fatigue was a real problem after the first couple flights. 8 would have been much easier.

- 15 beers also take a long time to taste through, when you're pouring flights for 10 people at once. It was nearly 3 hours, start to finish, moving at a fairly decent clip.

- Once you sample a few hoppy beers in a row, a lot of the hoppiness and bitterness get muted due to palate fatigue. This has the interesting and unexpected side effect of allowing the malting to really shine through, and also illustrates relative hoppiness - a couple of the IPAs tasted hoppy/bitter even after trying many of the others.

- There needs to be plentiful foods available to help freshen the palate and slow down alcohol processing. Insightful critical evaluation of beer is really hard when you're buzzed.

Overall, I was very pleased with the results. I'm hoping to put together more such tastings in the future, either centered around styles or geography. If y'all haven't been to a blind tasting before, I highly recommend it!