Rating to style
This has been discussed before from various angles, but after listening to the Imperial Stout show I have to bring it up again.
I don't think "this is not what I'm looking for in an imperial stout" is a valid argument in your format of tasting, even when you're doing style shows. Because it's a set of beers that you have picked and placed in an imperial stout themed show together, although one is a hoppy IS, one is a coffee IS, one is a belgian yeast, multigrain IS, and so on.
In a contest the brewer decides to submit his beer to a certain style, with certain guidelines that it's supposed to live up to. But it's not fair that you pick the beer and put it in the box that's Imperial Stout and then blame it for not living up to the guidelines. (Unless of course it says imperial stout on the label and the beer is a pale lager or a cherry flavoured sour ale). You can only blame Jeff for finding the wrong beer for your expectations :)
I love the Czar though, and "this is what a classic Imperial Stout tastes like" is a fine argument. Just not "this is better than the others because of that"
Hope it makes sense. I love you anyway.
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Bravo, Chris. I couldn't
Bravo, Chris. I couldn't agree more.
How many times have they done the beer ratings purely on "enjoyableness?" I dare someone to go back and count it. When you are that subjective with your ratings, which is brilliant, I think that you should allow for some wiggle room in the styles. Remember the Tabasco Porter? That sure as hell isn't in any style that exists yet.
One may have impressed you more overall, or one may have a characteristic that you enjoyed more. Fine, describe that and why that is more enjoyable for you over other characteristics in an RIS.
Any way, yeah. Chris said it better than I and I won't beat a dead horse.
-JDZJ
Tempe, AZ
I appreciate the comments
I appreciate the comments but I do think that if anything we displayed our biases on our sleeves the entire show, and didn't cover it up. We were quite clearly looking for something during the show and didn't get much of it.
It's one of our "gimmicks" that we do rankings at the end of the show, but those rankings are as subjective as anything else. We tried to describe the beers as best as we could, and we explained why this beer didn't fit our expectations, why that beer didn't - and what our expectation was.
If you're looking for a hoppy, bitter Imperial stout, then by all means go with the Nogne O. By all means. We don't want to discourage people from trying new beers. We do want to explain that it's not your typical imperial stout, it's not at all what we expected, and because it didn't fit our idea of what we wanted going in, we didn't enjoy it as much as we hoped. If you go into drinking Nogne O expecting and wanting a bitter, hoppy IS, then you'll get a kick out of it.
It's certainly a reasonable observation of us that we are less amenable to stylistic differences in something like an Imperial Stout as opposed to, say, the wide range of tastes we have experienced in IPAs. But is it reasonable criticism? I don't have a good answer for that. On one hand, I totally agree that our expectations of the style were much more limited than other styles. On the other hand, I don't necessarily believe that we did anybody a disservice as long as we accurately described what we were expecting, what we got, and why and how what we got disagreed with what we were expecting.