64 IPA Challenge: Day 1: 64 to 32

Beer Luvvas,

Last Saturday, Gooney hosted the first day of his EPIC 64 IPA Blind Taste Bracket where a group of 30 beer 'connoisseurs' narrowed the field from 64 to 32 for the follow up event this Saturday.

I can't tell you anything about any of the beers that we've tasted to date, because none of the names were revealed last Saturday, but I can let you know how Gooney set up the event.

As all previous events, the beers were seeded heads-up (#1 v. #64 and #2 v. #63, etc.) based on rankings compiled from BeerAdvocate and RateBeer.com. One item of note is that there were many beers that were seeded higher in Gooney's original 32 beer IPA event a year ago then they are now, and a few that were previously seeded and are no longer either available, or ranked in the top #64 IPAs. Which means, as you probably have noticed, that there are a lot of good IPAs available these days.

Gooney divided the tasters into groups of pairs and threesomes which were then teamed up in different rounds to taste the different beers. Each participant tasted half of the 64 beers in the event, but the groups were changed up every round so (like happened to me last time) any one person wasn't always out-voted by the same D-bags every round. A nice improvement I must say!

Another change was that Gooney used an NFL Preseason Theme to name the beers and paired Raiders #1 v. Raiders #2 or Saints #1 v. Saints #2 in each head to head match up, and he informed us that 50% of the #1 beers were the higher seed, and 50% were the lower seed to remove as much "positional bias" as possible in the blind tastings.

The only bummer is that slightly into round 3, it became quite clear that I was coming down with a monster head cold which kept me in bed all day Saturday so my lack of flavor discerning had more to do with my histamine production than the products I was tasting.

I've successfully recovered, and I'm looking forward to the second phase where we'll go from 32 beers down to one this Saturday....stay tuned for the results!

Prost to Gooney for his 64 IPA Blind Taste Challenge!