We could answer merely that under blind tasting conditions, the panel didn’t like this beer, or that the beer was boring or flawed. But that would be the boring, flawed answer. All the fun lies in the more substantive defense of each of these ratings and the dialogue that ensues—a dialogue that could well lead to new blind tastings and have a material effect on future editions. What exactly should we be searching for in an ideal European pale lager? Supremely refreshing bitterness, or balanced hop character and greater complexity? (Seamus and I debated this one a lot; the answer, I think, might be connected to how many beers you plan to drink.) That’s why, as Seamus has said, we also really hope you look past the ratings and read the text of the reviews.

It is the more interesting conversation about what constitutes a “good” or “bad” beer, about what it even is to rate beer, and ultimately about the basic philosophical problem of intersubjectivity—that we’re hoping to stimulate. That’s also part of why we chose not just to review the cult beers, but also the everyday beers that are most available around the country. We wanted parts of the book to be familiar to anyone who had ever tasted beer; we wanted to include benchmarks, points of reference, for everyone.

I was happy to see this review of The Beer Trials by Rob Rutledge discuss this engagement with mainstream beers. Rutledge writes: “along with Chimay Blue, they actually DO rate Natural Light! And Bud Light, for that matter, and MGD, and Busch, and every other cheap beer under the sun.” We wanted to see how these beers would hold up in blind tastings. We wanted to praise the ones like Steel Reserve, which outperformed expectations, while calling out the beers like Corona and Heineken, whose premium positioning (compared with entry-level domestic lagers) isn’t supported by much going on in the bottle.

Above all, to start a broad conversation about beer in America while ignoring the country’s most popular beers would be to lose sight of the conversation’s purpose.

I’m looking forward to reading Seamus for the rest of the week at the Powell’s blog. In the meantime, here’s a previously posted preview of the book (including all beer ratings), which is now in stock at, appropriately enough, Powells.com (Portland indy pride!) along with Amazon.

The book, due out on April 15 from Fearless Critic Media (distributed by Workman Publishing), rates and reviews 250 of the world’s most prominent beers (craft brews, macro-lagers, and everything in between), based on blind tastings by a panel of brewers and experts in the beer mecca of Portland, Oregon—Seamus’ hometown. We also include a broad and (hopefully) accessible reference guide to the world’s major beer styles, flavors, and regions.

The collaboration was, I must admit, a bit lopsided: Seamus (who is a brewer and one of the world’s 96 Certified Cicerones) did the lion’s share of the work. I contributed the “Trials” concept (building on the ideas set forth in The Wine Trials) and co-wrote the first few chapters, which discuss the effects of behavioral marketing, perceptual bias, and the placebo effect on the beer industry.

In Portland, Seamus and I also conducted a beer experiment together in which we tested people’s ability (or, um, lack thereof) to discriminate between major European brands of mass-market lager beer. Johan Almenberg and Anna Dreber, the Swedish economists with whom we collaborated on much of the experimental research behind The Wine Trials, helped us analyze the data.

Seamus, along with his partner (and my old high school friend) Laurel Hoyt, assembled an excellent blind-tasting panel of brewers and beer experts in Portland. Seamus and Laurel tirelessly ran the blind tastings, procuring beer samples from all over the world, storing them in climate-controlled conditions, and running up to five tastings per week for months on end—all the while keeping the tasting panel happy and well-fed.

Seamus also crafted the reference guide to styles, flavors, and region, which more or less boils his brain’s enormous body of esoteric beer knowledge down to what’s most useful to readers and beer drinkers. The project was a blast, and I hope the book turns out to be helpful both to beer enthusiasts and to everyday beer drinkers.

This sneak preview PDF includes a press release about The Beer Trials; the book’s full preface; the book’s full beer ratings list; and 11 sample beer reviews.

The Beer Trials hits stores nationwide in the third week of April. It can be ordered online from Amazon.com.

For media requests, please contact Fearless Critic Media.

Wine is still the thing to accompany a family dinner or elaborate restaurant meal in southern Europe, which is why their per-capita wine consumption remains higher than ours. But because Americans increasingly tend to order wine at bars, and Europeans generally don’t, this gap is closing rapidly. The US now beats Italy in total wine consumption.

In Italy, amongst young professionals, a far more popular nighttime endeavor than going to the sort of upmarket (or so-called “gastronomic”) restaurant where you’d order wine is getting a big group together at a pizzeria. And contrary to US stereotypes, the Italians actually almost never drink wine with pizza—it’s strictly beer (or Coca-Cola).

In most of Spain, it’s the cervecería—not the wine bar—that defines the nighttime casual-eating-with-groups culture, and there, draft beer (“caña,” typically poured in tiny glasses) is beautifully paired with what’s often eaten: raciones of fatty jamón iberico and sweet pan con tomate; marinated fish, garlicky shellfish, and vinegary vegetables; boiled octopus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika; or pinxtos/canapés (bites of food served on slices of baguette), which often come free with each round of drinks.

When Spanish or Italian beer comes fresh from the tap, its elegant taste profile can yield extraordinary pleasure. Mahou, Nastro Azzurro, Estrella Damm, Forst, and Cruzcampo may not be dissimilar from each other, but they’re all models of balance, clean, bright, and refreshingly bitter. They’re usually poured properly—allowing the head to collect into something creamy and dense—and, like dry Basque sidra, they’re well suited to the occasion, which is precisely what seems to have been lost in translation in America’s rapid adoption of wine as a cocktail.

Even at Spain’s expensive restaurants, beer is often offered as an apéritif—an alternative to dry Manzanilla or Oloroso sherry, before you start with the wine—something I’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

Because Spanish and Italian beer doesn’t have the sort of hopped-up, boozed-out complexity that caters to critics—it’s not trying to be Belgian or Oregonian—you won’t see them much at, say, New York’s beer bars, and there’s a popular misconception that these countries just don’t do beer well. (That misconception is backed up by the fact that when you order, say, Peroni by the bottle at a bar in the US, it almost always turns out to be something skunky and/or honeyed and legitimately disgusting. Don’t ever order Italian beer when it’s imported in bottles. But that’s an article for another day.)

Yes, the wine bar concept is spreading through southern Europe, and that might be applying a gentle upward pressure on wine consumption amongst the trendsters there.

But the wine bar is still really an American thing, and it hasn’t really yet permeated mainstream yuppie culture anywhere across the Atlantic. Generally speaking, in Europe, the words “wine bar” signal a New York fetish nightclub, or a restaurant with terrible pan-Asian cuisine and an overpriced list of Champagne magnums and Grey Goose bottle service. These places typically serve crappy imported beer, and often don’t even run a tap—the ultimate fuck you to the country’s authentic beer culture.

Why must hot bodies and a well-conceived drink program so rarely overlap?

At a recent beer-tasting event held at the Workman headquarters, Randy told me that, generally speaking, bottled beer should be poured straight into the dead center of the glass, not into a glass tilted at a 45-degree angle, as is popularly believed. When beer is poured into a tilted glass, Randy argues, the head never fully forms, and you miss out on the beer’s creamy introduction.

True to his word, in Tasting Beer, Randy describes how beer should be poured for judging at a competition: “Pour the beer right down the middle of the glass, wait for the foam to settle, and if needed, pour 

a little more.”

The late beer critic Michael Jackson seemed to agree with this generally, although he dissented in the case of ales, which he preferred without too creamy a head. In Ultimate Beer, Jackson writes (of pouring ales): “A gentle, steady pour down the side of the tilted glass will stop the beer from foaming excessively. Steepen the angle and pour more directly to avoid the beer being too flat. Aim for one ‘finger’ of foam. Too much creaminess will rob the beer of its appetizingly bitter character. The hop oils will migrate from the beer itself and hide in the head.”

Mosher and Jackson agree that German-style weizens (wheat beers), which have high levels of carbonation, are an exception to any pouring rule. Writes Mosher: “The traditional method of pouring will amaze and astound your friends. First, rinse a very clean glass with clean water. With the glass in one hand and the bottle in the other, invert both at a steep diagonal angle. As the glass fills, keep the neck of the bottle just above the level of liquid in the glass. If you do it right, you’ll get a full glass with foam right up to the rim. If you do it wrong, well, you may find yourself mopping beer off the table. The final step is to take the near-empty bottle and roll it back and forth on the table, then pick it up and dribble the yeast in a circular motion on top of the foam, where it will melt through and create a cascade of cloudiness through the beer.”