The Beer Trials
Last month Fearless Critics Media released The Beer Trials, a new addition to the always-expanding field of beer guidebooks and best beer rankings. The book, which isn’t too shy to be called “the essential guide to the world’s most popular beers,” was co-authored by Seamus Campbell and Robin Goldstein. Both the author’s names may look familiar to you; the former is one of just 96 Certified Cicerones in the world of beer experts, and the latter authored a rather notorious book called The Wine Trials.
The Wine Trials made a big splash in the world of wine-tasting a couple years ago, when the author and his panel of tasters held blind tastings of a number of wines. At the end of the trials, a number of cheap (i.e. less than $15) wines were considered better than their $50+ shelfmates. For The Beer Trials, Goldstein and co. bring the test to the world of craft and mass-produced beer, brown-bagging and tasting some 250 brews. The question that they aim to answer; while there isn’t a necessary correlation between price and taste in wine, is there one in beer?
The book, a slim paperback that goes for $14.95, is split into two parts. The first part, “The Beer Landscape,” details the advertising, hype-building and rising prices of beer from brewers big and small. Part One also has a better-than-most primer on beer brewing, styles, and tasting. For someone that isn’t experienced with tasting and reviewing beers, the sections on style and flavors – specifically where flavors come from, what to look for, and how to verbalize your tastes – are some of the best I’ve seen this side of Mosher’s Tasting Beer.
Part two of the book, “The Beer Trials”, describes the selection process and methodology of the blind tastings. A list of 250 of the most widely-distributed beers in the US and Canada was built, with a mix of macro and microbrews. The brews were then tasted by a rotating subset of the full panel of beer tasters. Each sample was grouped with other beers of the same family, and the brews were sampled from flights ranging in size from 3 to 9 beers. As far as I can tell, the methodology is flawless – with the blind tastings and the large number of experts doing the ranking, along with a great reviewing environment, I don’t doubt that all the beers were reviewed only on their merits.
After the methodology explanation, the book dives into rating the huge number of beers. Each beer page has a picture of the bottle, a numerical rating (on a scale of one to ten), a description of the beer, a review, and a critique of the bottle art. These are definitely bite-sized chunks of information, and it’s rare to see a review longer than four sentences.
So, the real question is, does this book succeed in the same way as The Wine Trials? Well, not really. Actually, the book seems to be kind of searching for a purpose.
The thing is, the surprises are few and far between. The craft beers, in every style, are on the high end of the point scale. Macros are on the low end. Similarly, the higher priced beers are well-rated, and the lower prices belie lower quality beer. Sure, there are a couple surprises – World Wide Stout from Dogfish Head is a clunker with a 3 out of 10, Bud’s American Ale ties with Full Sail Amber and Stone IPA with a 6, as does Steel Reserve 211 High Gravity. For the most part, though, there aren’t any shockers.
The book also seems very weighted towards macro beers. While I can kinda understand that – if you’re looking for widely-distributed beers, you’re going to find a lot from the big brewers – I don’t think the panel needed to rate Bud Ice, Bud Light, Bud Light Lime, Budweiser and Bud’s American Ale. The largest style rated in the book by far is Pale Lagers with over 80 entries, and most of these are macros.
The beer reviews, apparently built by committee, are also lacking. As I mentioned, most are only three or four sentences long. Some, like Harp Lager, are a single sentence. In an “essential” guide to beer, I wouldn’t mind a review a bit longer than most you’ll find on Rate Beer. A bit more text is put into the reviews of every beer’s label, a snarky addition that seems wildly out of place in a book about blind tastings. Sure, the label reviews can be funny and clever, but take up a lot of real estate that could be spent discussing the beer.
At the end of the day, The Beer Trials tries to be a jack-of-all-trades and ends up as a master of none. Although it isn’t the focus of the book, the best part is the description of beer tasting, beer advertising, beer flavors and the methodology behind the trials. However, these are topics that are covered in far more depth in Tasting Beer. The style descriptions are well-done, but covered with more detail and more grace in The Naked Pint. With 250 beers and many of them brewed by the big three, Michael Jackson’s guides and books like 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die offer a much better guide to beers worth trying. The copy on the front cover (“… the world’s most popular beers”) is correct, but with so few surprises it isn’t essential in the way The Wine Trials is.
One hopes that, if anything, this book converts some beer drinkers to better beer. As a book for the layman, it’s hard to argue the numbers – cheap mass-produced beer doesn’t taste as good as craft beer. If that’s the only lesson to take from The Beer Trials, it’s a good one.
6 Comments to “The Beer Trials”
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Does this book consider the freshness of the sample? I would give a 1-month old Stone IPA a 10/10, but 12 months later, that same bottle would likely score in the range of 4-5 out of 10.
[...] Posted by admin | General | Posted on May 26th, 2010 The beer reviews , apparently built by committee, are also lacking. As I mentioned, most are only three or four sentences long. Some, like Harp Lager, are a single sentence. In an “essential” guide to beer , I wouldn’t mind a review a bit … See the rest here: Josh Christie » The Beer Trials [...]
steel reserve comparable to a beer you can actually drink!!??? lol
Wahoo; The book notes that the beers that were “lightstruck or flawed” were replaced with fresh bottles, and that the beers were purchased from local beer stores or provided by the breweries. Presumably, this means that they took care to drink beers at the recommended age.
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