more photosGive thanks Central Oregonians, for we live in a beer drinking paradise.
In fact, what we might consider a problem others would accept with envy: There are so many beers offered among nine local breweries that it's hard to keep track of which seasonal brew is coming out when without a flow chart. And several other newbie brewers are flirting with the scene, including soon-to-open No. 10 GoodLife Brewing Co.
It's enough to make a beer consumer wonder: Is there a way to know which brewery makes some of the best suds in Central Oregon? How would they fare in a face-off?
The answer, of course, is sort of. Each brewery makes an array of beers, appealing to different palates, at different times of year. Any results would be subjective, based only in the present and nuanced by myriad factors.
Nonetheless, we at The Bulletin couldn't resist the idea of tasting local brews side-by-side.
So we recruited five local beer aficionados to participate in a blind tasting of brews from all nine local proprietors. None of the tasters are employed by local breweries. But three of them are in the business of beer, and all of them have knowledge of and passion for the lovely liquid (see “Our tasters”).
Then we picked one of the most popular and ubiquitous beer styles as our subject, the India pale ale, commonly referred to as IPA. While a number of the breweries offer several versions of IPA, such as a bold, heavily hopped Imperial, we opted to put to tasters the baseline version presently available on tap.
We got the tasters together and put scorecards in front of them. They also had as a reference the characteristic guidelines from the American Homebrewers Association's Beer Judge Certification Program. We kept the breweries unidentified until the very end.
They swirled and sniffed and tasted, pondered and penned their thoughts. They launched into a few lively discussions, too, discussing sweetness, bitterness, aromas and malt. Overall, two themes emerged.
First, the panelists themselves seemed surprised by the beers they ranked at the top. Two of the ones they liked best came from breweries they haven't frequented.
Old Mill Brew Wërks is relatively new. It produces in Silver Moon Brewing's brewery and has so far made just two batches of IPA. Several of the tasters said they had tried the first batch and felt more impressed by this second round.
Another taster favorite, Three Creeks Brewing Co., is located in Sisters. But those who reside elsewhere in Central Oregon can enjoy Three Creeks without a trip, as several of its beers are available on tap in pubs and in 22-ounce bottles in stores.
The lesson: If you try something — or someplace — new on occasion, you might be rewarded.
The other result the tasters didn't anticipate is that the IPA from Bend legend Deschutes Brewery, Inversion IPA, was not close to the top. The panel members discussed their high regard for Deschutes and clearly believed it would be a favorite. But in their comments, three of the five felt Inversion didn't fit the IPA style, with two saying it seemed more like an amber ale.
The Inversion is one of the top 10 best-selling IPAs in the country, said Mark Hegedus, director of sales and marketing for Deschutes Brewery. He said it's been well received in the beer industry and by consumers.
He also noted that here in the Pacific Northwest, beer drinkers' palates have become more and more accustomed to beer with a strong hop flavor, and Deschutes strives to make Inversion a balanced beer with a strong malt to balance the hops. Whereas a panel of five from the Pacific Northwest might favor big hops, another five tasters might find hoppier beers less palatable.
For example, he said, a Deschutes beer like Red Chair NWPA, which stands for Northwest pale ale, is called both a pale ale and an IPA by the brewery. It would be considered an IPA in some areas of the country, he said. But here, where beer consumers like more hops, Red Chair comes off as a pale ale, which is less hoppy than an IPA.
“One of the things that's fun about beer is ... it's not like there's one perfect way,” Hegedus said. “For the average consumer, it's about their taste buds.”
Some breweries expressed surprise at the results. Others noted how subjective beer tasting can be.
Brew Wërks, for instance, conducted its own IPA March Madness contest with eight local breweries represented and customers judging the beers, said Brew Wërks owner David Love. McMenamins wasn't included in the event.
The final four were: Old Mill Brew Wërks, Boneyard Beer, Deschutes Brewery and Three Creeks Brewing, said Love, with Boneyard's RPM IPA winning top honors.
No beer sampled by our tasters was considered bad. Which is significant, said 10 Barrel Brewing partner Chris Cox.
“It tells you something about the quality of craft goods coming out of Bend,” he said. “It just means that there's some cool things happening in beer in Central Oregon.”
How we did it
We wanted as level a playing field as possible for our blind beer tasting.
In our research, we consulted two regional beer buffs, Megan Flynn, editor in chief of Beer West magazine, and Christian DeBenedetti, a freelance writer who specializes in beer. DeBenedetti's new book, “The Great American Ale Trail: The Craft Beer Lover's Guide to the Best Watering Holes in the Nation” is slated for publication in September by Running Press.
We didn't tell the breweries of our plan and asked our tasters to stay mum, as well. We picked up the beer on a Saturday from the brewery pubs in growlers — glass jugs used for transporting draft beer — since not all the breweries bottle. We held our tasting the next day.
We came up with scorecards for the tasters to jot down notes and scores on a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 being the highest. The categories were appearance, aroma, flavor, mouth feel and overall. The overall score was not the cumulative score of the previous four but the overall impression, since the tasters felt that beer flavor, for instance, should be given more weight than appearance.
There were a few variables we weren't certain we could plan for. Most significantly, since all our tasters have a high beer IQ, would they automatically identify what they were drinking? So we included a slot on the scorecard for our panelists to guess. We asked them to not verbalize it until after all nine beers had been sampled.
The highest number of correct guesses went to Evan Hendrix, beer specialist for Whole Foods Market in Bend. He named six: Bend Brewing Co., Boneyard, Cascade Lakes, McMenamins, 10 Barrel and Three Creeks. Tom Gilles, co-owner of The Brew Shop, guessed four. Several chose not to guess.
The five panelists sampled the beer in random order, nibbling water crackers and sipping sparkling water to cleanse their palates between tastes. They fell silent as the beer arrived, becoming intent on taking small swallows and making comments. But they chatted with each other on their impressions between beers.
For Hendrix, participating in a formal tasting was fun. “I try to get my friends to do this and they say, ‘Huh?'”
In the end, Hendrix added, there is good beer, and there is good beer in context.
“It depends on the weather, it depends on what you're eating, it depends on the people you're with.”
Beer in context
Even if the same IPAs the tasters sipped two weeks ago are still on tap at the brewery, they might now taste slightly different.
One reason is that breweries regularly tinker with their formulas, although some more so than others.
Beer involves agricultural products, such as hops, which have a harvesting season and then change in acidity over the course of a year in storage, said Tyler Reichert, owner of Silver Moon Brewing. Some breweries adjust for that with technology. Others tweak the formula the same way a baker might change a recipe for elevation — the goal is for the consumer not to notice the difference.
Several of the brewers noted that they are constantly brewing new IPA batches, as the drinking public can't get enough.
“IPA is one of those that's really come into vogue, it's really mainstream,” said Tonya Cornett, brewmaster for Bend Brewing Co.
Cornett said Elk Lake IPA is one of the BBC's most popular beers and she is regularly on the verge of being too low in supply.
“That means it's really fresh,” Cornett said. “And an IPA is meant to drink fresh.”
As the beer-drinking public has embraced IPAs, it's also wanted the beer to have more and more hop flavor, Reichert said.
“A lot of companies are making stronger, bigger, more robust IPAs by the day,” he said.
“Everybody wants hops right now,” agreed Clay Storey, brewmaster at Boneyard Beer. “The IPA style is the leader in the Northwest.”
The concept that there is a beer-drinking public interested in sipping a brew and making comments like it has a “citrusy aroma with hints of green apple” is heartening, several local brewers said.
“In the wine industry, people understand that the 2006 pinot noir is different than the 2007,” Reichert said. “In the beer industry, people don't expect it to change. But that mind-set is changing some as more complex beers come to market and become more commonplace.”
