The Beer Trials

The Beer Trials

by Seamus Campbell and Robin Goldstein
Fearless Critic Media, 320 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Do you think Chimay Blue (Grande Réserve) is one of the world's best, while the Leffe Blonde sitting next to it at the local store is only just drinkable? That Deschutes Obsidian Stout is the category killer and that Guinness Draught is a waste of money? Widmer Brothers Broken Halo IPA a revelation and Harpoon IPA pure plonk? Or that you should put your hand over your heart before drinking the near-perfect Lagunitas Pils, but the mere presence of a Tsingtao should make you choke?

If so, then The Beer Trials should be right up your alley. As with Fearless Critic's last book, The Wine Trials, the idea is to get together some beer lovers and have them taste beers in all price ranges, all of them in brown paper bags. The goal is to shoot down all the subconscious might of advertising and to disallow the indoctrination power of tradition to arrive at which beers are really best.

As a long-ago grad student in statistics, these types of studies always bring two words to mind: reliability and validity. Would these results be repeatable (reliability), and do they actually measure whether a beer is good or not (validity)? Personally, I have both a Guinness Draft and a Leffe Blonde sitting in my fridge right now, and both will bring me a great deal of pleasure. That being said, this is an iconoclastic look at an industry that needs a bit more light shined on it. The writing is helpful and not at all didactic, and the authors manage to cover most of the beers with pretenses toward national distribution. Even experts will find it useful, in the same way a perusal of the beer list at the Ginger Man or the Draught House brings to mind beers you haven't thought of in a while.