barebops.blogg.se - Space monkey ipa

#SPACE MONKEY IPA FULL#
#SPACE MONKEY IPA PROFESSIONAL#

We would greedily drink any one of these beers, any day of the week. Here we go-into the proper rankings! Beers #50-26 were uniformly excellent-there are some fantastic IPAs here that, on another day, might have ended up in the final tasting and had a chance at the #1 spot. Jekyll Brewing Hop Dang Diggity Southern IPAĪnderson Valley Brewing Spring Hornin’ IPAīlack Diamond Brewing Co. Rollin’ and Tumblin’ IPAĢ1st Amendment Brewery Brew Free! Or Die IPA

#SPACE MONKEY IPA FULL#

Check out the full list below, and keep in mind these are not ranked. It’s symbolic of the fact that these results can’t be predicted. Perhaps it simply had a tough heat, but that lauded, classic IPA didn’t jump out at the judges when tasted blind. The biggest shock in this whole bunch is almost certainly Russian River Blind Pig, which we assumed would book easy passage at least into the top 50. Most of these IPAs were good, and some of them were bordering on excellent, but they can’t all be in the top 50. That’s why we committed so fully to the blind-tasting method.īut enough explanation: Let’s get on with the results. Yes, there were surprises on all fronts, both in the beers we loved and the beers that didn’t speak to us as we expected. But of course, some managed to rise above and prove themselves as transcendent drinking experiences. In reality, we enjoyed almost every one of these beers on some level-from about #100 onward, we’re talking about solid American craft beers that we would happily drink at just about any time. Naming one brewery as #116 doesn’t accomplish anything and seems excessively mean-spirited. We even had optimal glassware, thanks to a shipment of the best IPA glasses in the world.īecause the goal is to determine the best beers rather than the worst, we’ve decided to rank the top 50 IPAs and list all of the rest in no particular order.

#SPACE MONKEY IPA PROFESSIONAL#

The group of 9 judges who participated in the final round included BJCP certified tasters, professional brewers, brewery owners, beer website operators, the owner of a chain of craft beer stores and a handful of professional beer writers.

We also included a couple of the highest-scoring beers to not advance from their group as wild cards.

Each day we tasted 10 IPAs blind, in carefully selected heats (still secret to all the tasters but myself), selecting the top 2 from each group to advance to a final tasting of 25.

Unfortunately, this disqualified a couple potential beers, but a limit had to be set somewhere for the sake of fairness. From 8% onward, you will find most breweries labeling their beers as DIPAs, while a few still call them single IPA, although we also came across beers labeled “DIPA” as low as 7.5%. This was a very tough limit to impose-the official BJCP definition ends at 7.5%, but many commercial examples can be found in the 7.5 to 8% range. “Amber/red IPA” is the darkest beer included, as it hasn’t quite been made into its own style just yet.

This is ”single” IPA only: No DIPA, no session IPA, no black IPA and no IPAs with Belgian yeast strains.

The competition was limited to American-style India Pale Ale, roughly as defined by the Beer Judge Certification Program.

If you want to know why any specific beer isn’t present (Hill Farmstead? The Alchemist?), then please, by all means consult that post, but know that the answer boils down to: “We probably tried to get it, and they don’t ship beer as a rule or don’t want to participate in tastings and rankings.” Trust us, we’d love to have every IPA on the face of the Earth, but instead we simply had to settle for most of the IPAs on the face of the Earth. It outlines some of the rules, which I’ll go over again below. You may have read our announcement about it last week, which was also an attempt to answer some basic reader questions. Yes, we tasted as many American IPAs as we could possibly get our hands on, and the final number ended up at a gaudy 116 (Check out the full gallery of every label). And yet, we went and did it anyway as a tribute to the country’s single most popular and widely consumed craft beer style. Insane to bruise our palates over the course of weeks with a metric ton of hop bitterness. Insane to risk the reputation of our taste buds on the completely blind results. Insane to put in the hours/days/weeks of emailing and phone-calling necessary to acquire the 100-plus beers. Insane to conceive of a 100-plus blind tasting of American IPAs. You can view it here.ĭear Paste readers: We are insane. Please note: We have now conducted a more recent version of this tasting, blind-tasting 247 American IPAs in August, 2016.