Reader's Digest "Best American Beers" list
Hey, I'm the author of The Beer Trials, and I wanted to note a couple things about that Reader's Digest list.
First, we wouldn't call those beers "the best American beers". They're the highest-rated American beers in the book, but we only rated 250 beers in this edition, and our goal was to cover the beers that people could expect to find readily around the country, so a lot of great beers aren't included—mostly seasonals and beers from smaller producers.
Second, ratings are subjective, and we recognize that in the book. My goal with the book was to give people the tools to understand what they like about beer and what they dislike, and then present data on what to expect in the beers out there. Our scores represent our taster's aggregate opinions on quality, and we make no effort to directly compare beers across disparate styles, but it's not a sign of failure, in my opinion, if you disagree with us that Widmer's Broken Halo is a delightful, light-bodied IPA. If you like your IPAs to be bruisingly bitter, more power to you.
That there is no objective standard for beer's hedonistic quality is part of what makes it great, in my eyes. Could we have a world of hefeweizens, imperial stouts, malty bocks, and bitter IPAs if everyone agreed what tasted best?
Maister said:
You know, these beer awards things frequently tee me off. Blind taste tests are one thing, but for those that aren't (and yes, I guess even sometimes for blind tests too, where a particular brand has a highly recognizable 'house flavor' to their yeast), I can't help but wonder if half the time they judge based on who the entry is rather than what. Is Goose Island IPA for instance really better than say Bell's Two Hearted?
You raise an excellent point. All of the tastings for The Beer Trials were blind tastings. Our panelists tasted beers in flights of 3-6 beers, grouped into similar styles (so nobody had to taste Deschutes Obsidian next to Hop Rod Rye or Bud Light).
I was actually surprised that Two Hearted or Oberon were not on the list. It used to be for the past few years that Oberon was on everybody's Best Beers List and even though I don't like IPAs, Two Hearted is pretty good and seems to be rising in popularity among beer snobs in metro Detroit and Washington D.C. (the two places I've had a few beers in the last few months).
There are no Bell's beers reviewed in this edition of the book. They are right on the edge for us in terms of production volume and distribution, so we might have included some of their beers, but in the end we were not able to procure any in the time frame demanded by our production schedule. I attempted to contact them for assistance, but they didn't get back to me.
Tastings for future editions will look to expand our coverage into regional craft breweries as well as cover the excellent seasonal offerings from craft brewers around the country.
You can read portions of our reviews for all of the beers in the book at our website:
http://www.thebeertrials.com
Cheers,
Seamus Campbell
Author, THE BEER TRIALS