I went for quality rather than quantity at GBBF this year, mostly sticking to the full third pint of the beers I tried, or a large enough amount out of the bottles we opened. When I wrote my piece the other day, I didn't have my notes with me, and it may have come across that I didn't enjoy the range of beers I had as much as I should have.
However now I sit here with my notes in front of me, I'm reminded that I had a pretty decent number of good beers. On the whole some of the IPAs and APAs from USA underwhelmed me, but they weren't bad by any stretch. What did it for me was the darker beers, and not just the strongest ones either.
Beers I tried which warranted a score of at least 3.6 on the RateBeer scale were:
The Tap Mansfield Sweet Stout
Lost Abbey The Angels Share
Kona Fire Rock Pale Ale
Tommyknocker Maple Nut Brown Ale
Stone 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout
Gritty McDuffs Punch You In The IPA
Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron
Cape Ann Fishermans IPA
De Molen Amarillo
De Molen Tsarina Ezra Reserva
Mayflower Porter
De Molen Bloed, Sweet & Tranen
Warbird Warhawk Pale Ale
Brooklyn Blast
Cricket Hill Colonel Bildes Altbier
Ducato Verdi Imperial Stout
Marble Janine's One
Smuttynose Wheat Wine
I'm not going to provide tasting notes for all of those as that will be very boring, but reading this list tells me three things.
That's a big list bearing in mind I tried just 52 beers
I didn't score the Italian beers particularly highly.
Taking notes on the beers does allow you to remember the good stuff from the crap. As much as it's nice to tinker about blagging and socializing, it is the beer that we go for.
2 comments:
Having heard Gazza waxing lyrical about Italian beers, I was quite keen to try them at GBBF. They seemed to be either delicious but odd (Almond 22 Frederic and Farrotta) or really rather horrible (Troll Shangrila Fumè). At any rate I felt I had begun a new and potentially quite interesting journey in my exploration of world beers.
wow.....so many tasting in such short time....cool. I would like to do that, too bad Malaysia don't have that many kind of beer.
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