Sunday 12 December 2010

Flavour Panel Christmas Tasting - Around the World in 12 Beers

Another year, another flavour panel Xmas tasting. This year Ann, Jax, Phillipa, Clive, John, Les, Ian et al. sampled their around the world as illustrated below.


In a just for fun rating game the panellists marked the beers out of 10. The mark represents the panellists' preference alone and does not take into account trueness to style or factor in ABV etc. Although the flavour panel are all screened and trained tasters they are not afficionados of modern craft brews. The recurring theme was that amount of hop bitterness in some of the beers made them unpleasant to drink. As one of the panel said of 5 AM saint "It's like Hawaii on the nose and Chernobyl on the palate!" The results are illustrated on the tasteful graph.



6 comments:

Adrian Tierney-Jones said...

Nice to see Cazeau do well, good little brewery, rather partial to their Tournai Noire.

ZakAvery said...

Dare I ask where DW placed on the graph?

Stuart Howe said...

That was my own personal favourite Adrian. Followed closely by My Antonia.

Modesty prevented me from asking for a rating for DW Zak. From the reactions to it I would estimate that it would have still come second to the Little Creatures Pale.

StringersBeer said...

"Hawaii...Chernobyl" Oh man, you know they'll use that.

Anonymous said...

Blimey O'Reilly. I'm not a hophead in any sense - it literally took me years to acquire the taste of Marble Dobber - and 5 a.m. Saint is one of the best beers I've tasted all year. It was on cask, though - maybe the bottled version is a different animal?

Stuart Howe said...

To a man (or women) the panel were offended by 5 AM saint. Most gave it minus scores but I recorded these as zeros. Lovely aroma but fierce acrid bitterness. Bit like a vindaloo, smells enticing but one mouthful and your palate is ablaze. It may have been the context in which it was drunk. The preceding beers would have had tiny fraction of the bitterness of Saint and this would have been balanced by sweetness. The panel also largely hated the Amager beer and the My Antonia was too bitter/grapefruit for some. When we were going through the screening process the bulk of the panel had average to moderately high sensitivity to bitterness. People who don't routinely drink highly flavoured drinks perceive tastes and sensations more strongly.

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