Waves of Contests

Apparently the age of tasting competitions has arrived. Over the weekend, two such events ended or evolved, and Oregon did well in both cases.

Beer Brawl
First, the Concordia Ale House hosted the second Annual Beer Brawl, a taste-off of four beers from Oregon, Washington, and California. Hat tip to John Foyston for posting the results he got off (drum roll please) the new Concordia website. (I'm actually more excited about that. I have now added their taplist to my list in the column at right.) Oregon cleaned up, 1160 to 941 for Washington and 840 for Cali. Deschutes' Armory XX Pale was the beer of the brawl.

2009 National IPA Challenge
I have been seeing references to this, but I really haven't the vaguest clue where it's happening, who's doing the tasting, or how the beers and brackets were selected. All I know is that Oregon's doing great--five of the Sweet 16 are NW, a quarter from Oregon. I turn now to Geoff Kaiser for this weekend's updates.

While many of us were pulling for all the NW IPAs to do well in Round 2 of the NIPAC this past weekend, I’m not sure anyone would have predicted the domination that our beloved IPAs smacked down on some very well-known challengers. The NW won all five of their matchups, including upsets of what could be termed 2 different “#1 seeds."

• Boundary Bay IPA takes down the well-known Bear Republic Racer 5 (none of us are surprised, but the rest of the country probably is…)
• Rogue Yellow Snow IPA defeats the midwest heavyweight of Bell’s Two-Hearted (I picked the Rogue upset here - hell yeah…great beer.)
• Big Sky IPA defeats Mad Anthony Sofa King’s Bitter IPA
• Deschutes Inversion IPA defeats Magic Hat HIPA
• Laurelwood IPA defeats Avery IPA

Round 3 Matchups:
Big Sky IPA vs. Moylan’s IPA
Boundary Bay IPA vs. Deschutes Inversion (NW vs. NW!)
Rogue Yellow Snow vs. Marin IPA
Laurelwood Workhorse IPA vs. Hoppin’ Frog Hoppin’ to Heaven IPA

So whatever it is, we're doing all right.