By Harley Zipori. My brother recently sent me a link to a CNBC web page entitled “The World’s Best Beers”. This is a slide show with commentary based on the RateBeer Best 2012 Award Results.
Now anyone who has ever Googled a commercial craft beer, no matter now obscure, has probably stumbled upon www.ratebeer.com. Thousands of beer tasters ranging from anonymous off-the-street quaffers to beer professionals write what they thought about a particular beer and give it a rating. Most of the raters seem to take this very seriously and it’s possible to get a decent feel for the beer by reading a number of opinions. If you like, you can see what the Rate Beer crowd things of one of my favorite Samuel Adams Beers.
On the Award Results Page, they claim there have been 3.5 million ratings. I guess that’s a big enough sample to satisfy any statistician (no, that is not a challenge if you happen not to be satisfied with 3.5 million) so when they compile all these ratings and come up with a list of 100 top rated beers in the world, I believe we should sit up and notice those beers. It also gives us something to strive for, especially us here in Israel. These are not going to be easy beers to find. Some are going to be impossible. Oh well, we can always dream.
The CNBC slide show presents the top 15 beers in the 2012 awards. I enjoyed their comments and stories on the beers as much as the descriptions of the beers themselves. I will let you go through the slides yourselves and see what is what and try to get a sense of how you would like each of these beers but there are a few beers that stood out, as least as far as being interesting or blog-worthy.
Here is a list of what I consider to be the highlights of the CNBC write-ups. Even the names are worthy of admiration. I hope the quotes will make you at least smile.
14. Fonteinen’s Armand’4 Oude Geuze Lente. ‘The beer is said to have aromas of leather, grapes, berries and melon rind. One taster described his experience: “The various flavors seem to pulsate as I work my way through the bottle, with some components asserting more on one sip as compared to another, but always pitch perfect in balance. If there is any flaw in this beer, I am not the person to say so.”’
11. Cigar City Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout. ‘The base recipe is Cigar City’s Marshal Zhukov Imperial Stout. However Hunahpu is a richer version aged on pasilla and ancho peppers as well as vanilla, cinnamon and cocoa nibs. “Killer,” “incredible” and “insane” are just some of the words used to describe it by raters.’
10. Deschutes Brewery’s The Abyss. ‘The Abyss is a special reserve series brew available only between December and February. Abyss is an appropriate name, since the beer is viscous and permits absolutely no visibility of light through its dark body. Ingredients include licorice and molasses. Thirty-three percent of the beer is aged in French oak barrels and oak bourbon barrels.’
8. Passionfruit and Dragonfruit Berliner Weisse. ‘Visually, nothing is said to compare to Cigar City’s Passionfruit and Dragonfruit Berliner Weisse. Pouring a vibrant neon pink sample for himself, one RateBeer taster described it as a “Sci Fi beverage.” The aroma is said to be as strange as the color, with a taste and smell of exotic fruits.‘
7. Russian River’s Pliny the Younger. ‘However, due to it being time- and space-consuming and expensive to make, it is only available once a year for two weeks in February. The beer has been known to sell out on the day of release. Consumers deem it to be worth the fuss though, with many claiming to have stood in line for hours to get some.’
4. Founders KBS (Kentucky Breakfast Stout). ‘Founders’ KBS is described by the brewers as an imperial stout brewed with a massive amount of coffee and chocolates, then cave-aged in oak bourbon barrels for a year to make sure its bourbon undertones come through: A combination that will “make your taste buds squeal,” the company says.’
3. Rare Bourbon County Stout (Retired). ‘Goose Island Bourbon County Stout was brewed in 2008 and aged for two years in 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle Barrels. A true rarity, each bottle of this beer has its own number and is now permanently retired.’
1. Westvleteren 12. ‘Introduced in 1940, No. 12 is so popular and produced in such small quantities that the website warns that if you call to make a reservation to buy the beer, it’s most likely that the line will be busy. Still, it’s an improvement over the old system, where cars lined up for miles outside without any guarantee of getting the beer.’
This is not a typical sample of artisan boutique beer. Nine of the fifteen are Imperial Stouts. These are stouts (Guinness is your best example of a commercial stout beer) but brewed with considerable more malt than would go into a typical stout, raising the alcohol level, boosting the flavor and increasing the cost. There were Belgian Lambic beers, a “quadrupel” Trappist beer (meaning literally 4 times the malt but who knows for sure) and a couple Imperial India Pale Ales that were brewed with much more malt and hops than a traditional IPA, which is already heavy on malt and hops. A number of the beers have non-traditional flavoring ingredients. Two were aged in Bourbon barrels. There is actually an Israeli Boutique Beer from the Shapira brewery, Jacks Winter Ale that is aged in Jack Daniels barrels. If you want to know what that is like, try to find some of that. It’s still winter.
I have not, however, seen a locally brewed pink beer but am open to furthering my beer education if one exists.
If I learnt anything from this year’s winners it’s that there are brewers out there taking an experimental, no compromising, take-no-prisoners approach to brewing craft beers. And the beer drinkers out there are responding. I mean really, who ever thought that a pink beer would make the top 10 (if you didn’t catch the pink part, you are not reading my blog thoroughly enough).
Now I have another mission in life: to try to taste at least one of these awarding winning beers. Even if it’s only to know what they are talking about.
This last weekend I actually brewed a batch of beer myself. It should be interesting but will take a while to ferment and I may even do a secondary fermentation. We’ll see how it tastes after a couple weeks fermenting at 15C. I’ll put off describing the beer until my next blog.
As usual, any comments can be sent to [email protected].
