Yesterday, I had my 366th featured beer of 2012. That beer closed the book on a very interesting, sometimes arduous, but mostly enjoyable experiment. It was an exercise in discipline, patience, dedication, and discovery. A different beer...every single day....for an entire year. It's a weird thing to stop and remind myself how substantial the accomplishment is, without patting myself on the back too much.
I learned a lot along the way, and I know that my palate will never be the same. The most obvious and notable thing I discovered last year is that I don't, as I once thought, hate IPAs. I think up until the start of the daily challenge, I hadn't had any really good ones or given the style an honest chance. But after having a ton of them this year, my taste buds have been rewired and I can declare myself a true hophead. A mouthful of bright, citrusy West Coast hops was once a frightening proposition, but now sounds like a fantastic idea.
I also learned that when you're shopping the craft beer scene, the good stuff far outnumbers the bad stuff. Quality is almost par for the course when you're talking about the products of the small to midsize breweries out there, like Bell's, Founders, and Great Lakes. Sure, I had some awful beers this year, but far more often than not the beers I had ranged from respectable to great. I was rarely surprised by a bad brew that I thought would be good, but was more often pleasantly surprised by ones I had low expectations for.
I only gave one "5" this year, to Duvel. Looking back, I may have been a bit stingy, as few of the 27 beers I gave a "4.5" rating certainly could have been elevated to that highest rating. Hopslam and Pliny the Elder could have received a 5 without me losing any sleep, and there are surely a few others in the same boat. One interesting thing about the "Hall of Fame" beers (4.5 and up) is that the styles represented are all over the map. I see stouts, pilsners, IPAs, hefeweizens, dunkels, witbiers and all kinds of other Belgian styles. So I guess that makes me well-rounded and open-minded.
I have no doubt that If I re-tasted things from the list, especially things from early in the year, some of my ratings would change. My tastes have evolved. My ability to critique and pick apart a beer has improved. And sometimes I may have unfairly rated a good beer when I was having an off day. In the future, I'm going to pay attention when I have a chance to try something on the 366 list again, and see if I still feel the same way about it.
In the end, this was a very interesting and educational journey. I'm honestly glad to be done with it, because the rigors of daily blogging and tasting threatened to ruin beer forever. But I'm glad I made it to the end. I'm glad I made myself try things I wouldn't have otherwise. I'm glad I took the time to think about what I was having and appreciate a lot of new things. Now, however, I can enjoy beer like a normal person (or at least a normal beer snob), and make everything I have nice and voluntary.
For those two or three of you who actually kept their eyes on this blog for most of the year, thanks for your silent support. For those of you who donated beer to the cause, thanks for the free stuff! And for anyone subjected to my rantings and potifications in the name of daily beer blogging, thanks for putting up with my pretentiousness.
-Dave
Statistics
Being the good engineer that I am, I compiled some statistics to see what I could learn from this yearlong experiment. Of the 366 beers in the list, they breakdown along these lines:
152 Different Breweries
Most Tasted Brewery: Bell's (15)
Honorable mention: Great Lakes (11)
Highest Rated Brewery (3 or more beers): Hofbräu Munich and Russian River (4.33)
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84 Different Styles (Based on BeerAdvocate's definition of a style)
Most Tasted Style: American IPA (40)
If you include American Double / Imperial IPAs, the number rises to 66 IPAs
Highest rated style (3 or more beers): Dortmunder and Quadrupel (4.17)
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Best Beer: Duvel (5)
Worst Beer: Bard's Gold (1.5)
Average rating of all beers (1-5): 3.51
(Std Dev = 0.59, meaning around 2/3 of the beers I had got a rating of 3-4)
Average ABV*: 6.37%
Volume of beer*: 34.3 gallons
Volume of Alcohol*: 2.18 gallons (27.5 750-ml bottles of 80-proof vodka)
*Average ABV, and volume calculations assume every beer was in a 12oz bottle. That's pretty close on average, but not completely accurate.
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