Recent Beer Tastings

Saying that I have tasted a lot of beers over the last weeks would be putting it mildly (styles tasting is a required part of class), but I have some non-school related beer tastings that are deserving of a post. Here we go:

Double IPA's (blind tasting)

Russian River - Pliny the Elder
Dogfish Head - 90 Minute IPA
Bell's - Hopslam

I honestly don't know if you can really pick a winner out of these three because they are all among the top 100 beers in the world on BeerAdvocate, but someone had to try. All of these beers are amazing hop-bombs with an alcohol content high enough to have you buzzing after just one (a nice price tag to limit your intake as well). I don't think we really did the Pliny or the Hopslam favors in the tasting because they are both a few months old and the hops do fade fast, but they were still great. We (Amy, Matt and I) didn't have any formal scoring system or written evaluations, we just picked our favorites. We didn't all totally agree, but one did finish with 2 votes for #1 (huge sample size I know). I am going to leave it to Heidi to reveal the winner...

Heidi's Perfect One: Hopslam

Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot Vertical

Bigfoot Barleywine '02
'03
'08
'09

The idea of a vertical tasting is to sample the same beer brewed over the span of a few different years. It is a interesting way to see how flavors can develop and diminish over time in certain beers. This needs to be done with a beer that is actually meant to age, because many beers are not suppose to be aged and will just taste like crap after a year.

Bigfoot Barleywine Vertical

It would have been a lot cooler if I had found some of the years between the '03 and '08, but I can't complain because I did find those '02 and '03's. Not many stores want to hold onto beers for that long, even if they can charge you a lot more for these vintage beers. We weren't trying to pick a winner, just see what sort of differences that we could find. The most notable difference was that the '09 is super hoppy for a barleywine and that faded quite a bit to the '08 and not really even noticeable in the '02 and '03. When fresh ('09), Bigfoot should probably be classified as a double IPA, but once aged a year it tastes a lot more like a traditional barelywine. After the noticeable drop off in hops from the '09 on, the biggest difference was the sherry qualities in the '02 and '03. Both of the old vintages were really good, a lot of flavors and aromas that aren't generally associated with beer.

This is not the first time that I will do a Bigfoot vertical, this is going to be a yearly occurrence for Bigfoot and me. Ideally, I would like to have five consecutive years every, that is going to have to be space and money dependant.