So You Think You Know Beer?

...then I would highly recommend competing in a fermentation identification contest. Our dear friends Lauren and Chris held a Fermentation Identification Competition last night which Gabe and I both took part in. It was a painful, wonderful experience. There is a list of rules, but mainly you are blindfolded while you taste 18 beers. The object of the game is to identify the most beers correctly. Sounds not so bad, right? Wrong - it was SO hard. The best is when there are people in your group that only drink _____ beer. During the competition, your true feelings of how beers taste come out. There was grimacing at "favorite" loyal _____ beer drinkers and incorrect identification of those "favorite" beers. All in all at the end I heard: "Please stand for the National Anthem of... Minnesota." Yes, I correctly identified 8 beers (15 points) out of 18 and took the gold. Gabe came home with the silver at 5 beers correctly identified (13 points) but only after TWO "lightning rounds" with Lauren, whom identified 7 beers correctly (but had 13 points too) after the first round. If you look at the chart you can see how our points worked out.

The competition in progress

Lauren and Gabe in their First Lightning Round

Gabe performing his high-tech id methods
Official FIC rules
The results are in...
I had never had Coors original and got it right...luck or skill? :)
Our medalist winners