Announcing the first ever Tournament of Stouts!

To begin this blog, I am announcing the first ever Tournament of Stouts, to be held on the first day of May, 2010.  This will indeed be an epic brawl – 16 stouts enter, only one emerges as the supreme champion of Stout beer.  The entrants were selected based on a number of criteria, but mostly the following.


1. I could find them by searching through a handful of excellent specialty beer stores in Maryland, the District of Columbia, or North Carolina.


2.  They are classified as Stouts.  This is a fairly simple thing to validate; the most this is pushed is to include the excellent Allagash Black, described as a Belgian stout on various sites.  Other than this one, I’ve never seen a Belgian Stout, and I thought it vital to include.  Incidentally – in case Rob Tod (owner/founder of Allagash, with whom I’ve drank and chatted twice at events in Richmond and DC) is reading this, it’s an absolute crime that you can’t buy Allagash Black by the bottle in Raleigh, NC.  Can you please bitch-slap your distributors to get that to the Raleigh area?  Total Wine is the easiest and most popular store to get it into, and I would totally buy a bottle every week or so.


3. I must not hate them.


4. They must not be insanely expensive.  There was only one beer disqualified for this reason, though I’m still tempted to include it if I can get a few people to go in on enough to make the tourney.


I’ve decided to seed the beers by price per ounce – if you cost more, then in theory you taste better, right?  We’ll put that to the test once and for all. I’ll be introducing you to the judges later in this blog; the only firm requirement is that you’re a fan of stouts.  In no way will this be a world-famous grouping of beer gourmands (at least, not until after this blog gets world famous, which it totally will).  I’ll also be introducing you to the contestants (the stouts).  There will be more tournaments like this in the future, perhaps leading to a final four beers of various types; we’ll see.  Right now, we’re judging stouts in a 16 stout single-elimination tourney.


The rules of the Tournament of Stouts:


1. For each matchup, every judge must drink at least one ounce (I’m hoping to find convenient disposable cups for two-ounce pours) and have a glass from which to smell the nose of the beer.  You have to actually swallow beer to properly taste it, unlike wine, so drinking is required.


2. In the event that the voting is tied (there is no restriction on the number of judges to force that number to be odd), the winner is the beer with the cheaper PPO (price per ounce) rating.  If the beers are still tied, everyone keeps drinking samples until a winner can be decided (though such a close vote is carefully documented).


3. No judge should be drunk at any time during the process.  Many of these beers are high proof, but be careful to judge as sober as possible.  You don’t have to be in driving shape the whole time, but you should be coherent and able to take notes on the finer points of the taste and smell of whatever you are drinking.  Our judges will be provided with saltines, pretzels, and water during the judging process.


4.  All judging must be done blind.  By blind, I mean that you absolutely must not know which matchup you are tasting.  The judge only decides between beer A and beer B, not specific breweries or brews.  Doing otherwise could introduce a bias.  Note that this requires you go through the semifinals and finals before finding out who won the semis; otherwise you would know who you were judging in the final matchup.  The semis have beers A vs B and C vs D, and then the winners battle it out (as do the losers, in case you want a 3rd place beer) before the losers are announced. 


With those rules in place, here are the preliminary seedings for the 2010 tourney.  The number beside each is the PPOz rating (price per ounce multiplied by 1000.  Why multiplied by 1000?  Because it makes the numbers prettier, naturally).

1. Schafly Reserve – 591
2. Southern Tier Choklat – 528
3. Hoppin Frog BORIS the Crusher Oatmeal Stout - 500
4. Great Divide Oak Aged Yeti – 453
5. Allagash Black – 433
6. Thirsty Dog Siberian Nights – 416
7. Oskar Blues Ten FIDY – 354
8. Weyerbacher Heresy Imp Stout – 250
9. Young's Double Chocolate Stout – 236
10. Sam Smith Imperial Stout – 235
11. Sam Smith Oatmeal Stout – 235
12. Sam Adams Imperial Stout – 229
13. Founders Breakfast Stout – 208
14. North Coast Old Rasputin – 208
15. Brooklyn Black Chocolate – 166
16. Guinness - 125

First, a note about how the PPOz was determined.  I purchased the beers at various stores and used the highly scientific price (before tax) divided by ounces purchased to determine this rating.  It’s entirely possible that wherever you are, Guinness is cheaper.  I don’t really care; it would be wonderful if we had a sampling of places where all of these could be regularly found, and then averaged the PPOz rating for them. I am going through a lot of effort to get this tournament together, but driving to dozens of beer stores throughout the mid-atlantic / northern southeast region of the US to find stats on average prices is out of my reach/desire. 


Second, there absolutely are notable omissions from this list.  There may be one or two changes before the tourney starts.  I’m particularly keen to ditch one of the Sam Smiths to avoid having two beers by the same brewery, so something is likely to change.  As far as why things were omitted, see the (far) above listing for why I included/excluded things.  If you think a beer should have been included, please, please comment. I’ll do my best to include it next time.  I know that not all of these are in the same league, but I felt it would be patently silly not to include, for example, Guinness, to see how well the cheaper beers would do (and the cheap ones are not necessarily the ones I personally don’t think will make it very far).


I wish I could have included De Molen’s Hel et Verdomenis (Hell and Damnation), but at over $1 an ounce, I simply couldn’t justify buying a whole lot of it for a party.  That may change (and it would easily be the new #1 seed, having a rating of 1103), but for now it’s out.


The intro to each judge will include their guesses as to who will win the whole shebang, but I’ll go ahead and list mine for good measure.  For those that provide them ahead of time (and I’ll try to get this from everyone), I’ll post their prediction brackets.  The matchups are shown below.
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1 - Schafly Reserve - 591
16 - Guinness - 125
8 - Weyerbacher Heresy Imp Stout - 250
9 - Young's Double Chocolate Stout - 236
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5 - Allagash Black - 433
12 - Sam Adams Imperial Stout - 229
4 - Great Divide Oak Aged Yeti - 453
13 - Founders Breakfast Stout - 208
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3 - Hoppin Frog BORIS the Crusher Oatmeal Stout - 500
14 - North Coast Old Rasputin - 208
6 - Thirsty Dog Siberian Nights - 416
11 - Sam Smith Oatmeal Stout – 235
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7 - Oskar Blues Ten FIDY - 354
10 - Sam Smith Imperial Stout - 235
2 - Southern Tier Choklat - 528
15 - Brooklyn Black Chocolate - 166
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Of these, I feel like the favorites are Allagash Black, Founders Breakfast, and Oskar Blues Ten FIDY.  My personal bracket has Founders over Oskar Blues in the final, though I think that Allagash ought to finish 2nd or 3rd;  I just see it having a hard time getting past my favorite to win it all, Founders Breakfast Stout, in the 2nd round.  I also think Oak Aged Yeti got a particularly crappy draw; they deserve to make it out of the first round, but as it stands I don’t see how they’ll do it.  Schafly makes the semis here in a walk, but I think only because of the favorable seeding.  I don’t see Heresy or Young’s Double Chocolate making much noise beyond round 1.  My big-time upset alert is Brookly Black Chocolate v. Southern Tier Choklat -  BBC is quite good, and could easily overtake its (far more expensive) opponent.  That should be a fun one to watch.  With these brackets, I see BORIS the Crusher ending up 3rd, which is fairly close to where I’d rank them by personal preference; I’d have them either 3rd or 4th, with the rest of the top four rounded out by Founders Breakfast, Ten FIDY, and Allagash Black (in no particular order). 


Anyhow, further brackets, predictions, judges, and beers will be introduced as this blog goes on.  I hope you all enjoy the tourney as much as I will being the judge.


Duff Out.