The Useful Limits of Beer Evaluation

Last week, I had a couple of friends visiting from out of town. One of them had never really spent much time in Oregon, and was especially interested in trying as much local beer as possible.

I agreed for a couple of reasons. First, it's always a pleasure to drink excellent craft beer - especially with someone experiencing it for the first time. And of course, I realized it'd provide plenty of useful fodder to blog about later on.

Our trip involved 2 days in Portland, one in Eugene, and one through the I-5 corridor between them (for us, this meant stops in Corvallis, Albany, and Salem).

I'll be writing more about the individual stops in the coming weeks, but there's a very useful piece of information I gleaned from the entire experience:

My days of being able to drink large quantities of beer with essentially no ill effect are probably over.

But the hangovers and slow-starting mornings aside, my real point involves palate fatigue. During our beer adventure, my friends and I sampled an average of about 100 new beers a day - almost always by splitting taster trays or flights at the breweries we encountered.

Generally, I'd start off being able to describe what I was trying reasonably well - noting mouthfeel, balance, adherence to style, and so forth. But by the third or fourth brewery, my ability to do so deteriorated significantly - and not because of the alcohol, I don't think. Rather, I found I suddenly lacked the ability to distinguish good beer from bad - it all started to taste pretty similar, and only extremely bold or strange flavors really made an impression.

So, the real lesson here is that I shouldn't be visiting more than a few breweries in a day if I want to be able to give honest and well-considered evaluations of the beers they're offering. With friends visiting from out of town, it's tempting to want to make as much use of the time as possible, but Oregon's extreme wealth of beer guarantees that no matter how quickly or how much one drinks, there's always more breweries to visit than can be reasonably accomplished in a short timeframe.

By way of illustration, during our trip from Corvallis through Salem, we stopped at 10 breweries in one day - an incredible feat of endurance, bravado, and foolishness, to be sure. But we'd have to match that pace for almost a week just to try most of the breweries in Portland alone.

During future beer-centric trips, I'll try to put these lessons to practical use - favoring deliberation and celebration of single excellent beers over attempting to try as many things as possible.