The Brew Blog

• Well, OK. Not a winner, really. But, strong confirmation that our brews are quality beers that have all the potential we have always thought they have. So how did it all happen?

Well, as Anne threw a non-birthday birthday party for Charles, we decided to have an impromptu taste-off. We happened to have some commercially bottled brews that matched three of our batches — Kiss My Trout, Infrared and Paleo-Bru (our English Ale, Irish Red and German Alt). And after some crafty anonymous pouring (thank you Anne and Chares for keeping people busy while we hastily set up), we had our test. And this was truly a blind taste test — only Scoob and I truly knew which was which).

This incredibly scientific representation (OK, really, they were all friends of Charles — about 15 people in all) came out like this:

• Our Kiss My Trout won out over the commercial English Ale (all names withheld) by a nose. Our favorite complement, other than Tom saying he liked the bouquet of ours, was “I’d buy either of them, I can’t taste a difference.” Scoob really liked that, saying it was a true complement. Charles and I had hoped people would say ours was hands down better, but we’re really not complaining.
• Our Infrared was a resounding winner over the commercial variety. We were extremely happy about that, especially considering we all agree that this batch of Infrared is probably the best batch of anything we’ve made. It has such amazing quality, color, clarity, flavor…simply put — it’s amazing, and a lot of people told us that yesterday.
• With our Alt, we found that people chose the commercial version better than ours. Frankly, we’re happy to see that people told us that, as this way we have something to improve on. Of course, given that we’re so proud of our Paleo-Bru, we’re rationalizing this by saying that the Alt we chose to put up against ours was a significantly different style. So, we’re convinced it wasn’t a fair competition. We’re going to go out and find a version that is more closely brewed in our style to see what happens.

All in all, though, we’re very pleased. Of the 15 people or so who took the test, we couldn’t ask for more! You guys were the best taste group yet (as you had no real reason to tell us how good our beers are — we are always afraid our wives may be trying to placate us…).

So here’s to a happy birthday, Charles! And many  more happy ones…as well as many more happy brews!

–Scot

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This entry was posted by sbarker on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.