Lew Bryson > wrote:
: "Bill Bradley" > wrote in message
: news:Tt10f.7352
:> Lew Bryson wrote:
:>> "Bill Bradley" > wrote in message
:>>>Who the heck voted Bigfoot the best Barleywine? Unless this batch was
:>>>spectacularly better than previous years I don't know how they'd crack
:>>>top-10.
:
:>> Ah, that would be blind tasters who didn't see what the label was on each
:>> beer, poor *******s, and only had taste and smell to go on, instead of
:>> years of finely honed opinion and prejudgment.
:>
:> Oh come on. I rather like a number of Sierra Nevada's brews, but I know I
:> am not alone in having found Bigfoot a rather unpleasant experience in
:> Barleywine. Although Heavyweight's Old Salty was not represented,
:> Weyerbacher and Old Dominion were (were Blithering Idiot, Millennium or
:> Insanity entered? They only list the breweries not the particular beers)
:> and I have had difficulty finishing previous years' Bigfoots at all, to
:> the point that I avoid them on principle, but this years would have to be
:> bloody spectacular to beat those two breweries, and they didn't even
:> place! Sorry I've "only" tried about a hundred different brews this year
:> (Bigfoot '05 not having been one of them) but I have a hard time buying
:> that as a gold medalist.
:
: Bill, take a look at who judges these beers. Over half the judges come from
: Colorado and west (Mountain state judges are always the biggest group, no
: real surprise). The East Coast (New England and the mid-Atlantic region)
: puts up about 15% of the judges (really, I have the numbers, I'm not
: guessing). I'm NOT saying that the judges are in a conspiracy, but what I am
: saying is that people gravitate towards liking what they drink on a steady
: basis. Western site for the festival, Western judges drinking Western beers
: (and they do, much more so than we in the East drink solely Eastern beers),
: Western beers win medals. I do not think that it's any surprising
: coincidence that Denver and Boulder together have --over the entire history
: of the GABF -- won more medals than any other city. Conspiracy? No,
: inevitable playing of the odds.
:
Of course there's no possibility that SN brewed up a small batch of
Bigfoot just to enter at GABF, is there? Only the little brewpubs do
that -- you know, the guys who never have the beer that won their gold
medal when you seek them out. SN wouldn't do that now, would they?
I had the opportunity to be a steward at the World Beer Cup -- got to be
in a room with a hell of a lot of bottles from a hell of a lot of
places. I saw and handled bottles from well known commercial breweries
with contents representing their well known flagship brews and said
bottles had handwritten labels on them. So, at a minimum, some special
care in handling was taken. I can only speculate as to whether the
contents were drawn from a "regular" batch on not.
Last October my vacation conincided with the release of the GABF winners
list. We made side trips to a lot of the winners sites and asked for he
specific beers that had won medals. If memory serves me correctly I
think maybe 30 to 40 percent of the beers we specifically asked for were
unavailable.
--
Bill
AT DOT
reply to bbenzel adelphia net
|