And now about the cauldron sing

The sweet embrace of roasted barley, caress of chocolate, and just a kiss of hops to finish the experience. Yes, we're tasting stouts. Dark & full-bodied (too much so, for some palettes), this old brew gained worldwide fame through a tall black can equipped with a widget. In this tasting, we challenge the old guard against the brash, sometimes unconventional, upstarts.


Who competed? Representing the old guard were Murphy's, Beamish, and Guinness, all dry Irish stouts. The young'uns came from all over. For imperials, we had Weyerbacher's Old Heathen, Great Divide's Yeti, and Southern Tier's Oat Imperial (yes, an imperial oatmeal stout). The pioneer reviver of the oatmeal stout style, Samuel Smith, represented England, and Rogue's Shakespeare Stout carried the weight of the West Coast on the Bard's shoulders. A local entry, 4BS from Dos Gueros, was dusted off from the basement and included in the mix. Finally, in an effort to redeem itself after the Porter Disaster of '10, Flying Dog's Gonzo Porter (labeled as an "American Stout") was allowed to compete).


A clear winner, Rogue's Shakespeare Stout, may bear such laurels by being the least offensive: of all ten beers, it had the lowest variance in scores.
An oatmeal stout hopped solely with Cascades, it pleased almost every palette (only two of 14 tasters gave it a score lower than 7.0).

By the same token, the cellar dweller oatmeal imperial showed the highest variance in scores. The proponents just couldn't overcome the majority of tasters who were less than impressed. Also of note are the old guard (indicated by tan points in graph above), which were not looked upon favorably.

• The Pants relinquished his stranglehold on the hater award; Katy took that mantle with an average score of 3.5.
  
• Chris, Michael, & Lani clearly like stouts. They all tied for highest average scores of 6.9.
  
• The Pants gets the fickle award, with a variance of 5.78 in scores; while Emrys is once again even-keeled with the only variance in tasting scores less than 2.
  
• Although he showed up halfway through the tastings, Lightnin' RC managed to run the table and taste all ten beers in half the time it took for the rest of the party!
  

Ambers & Bitters coming up next to bid farewell to winter...

Beerspace!

What happens when you combine a hearty appreciation for hops with unhealthy affection for quantitative analyses? The answer is beerspace, an attempt to visualize beer quality and personal tastes via principal components analyses. First, let it be known that many assumptions have been violated (they were pretty drunk, though), including missing data, non-independence among samples, and differing quantification conditions. The results are not too surprising:

24 beers included in the analyses, although only notables are indicated on the graph above. For those wondering where Road Dog Porter falls, forget it. The panel was so polarized against Road Dog it threw everyone into one crowded corner of beerspace. It was deemed an outlier and properly dealt with. Eugenia & Chris are trying their best to be outliers as well...

The "Hop Cluster" is a jumble-muck of many hop-heads. Let's take a closer look:

Not that this focus helped much.

The landscape of this space will surely change with future tastings; additionally, the accuracy of the space representation would be greatly improved by filling in values for missing data. Perhaps we'll have to do more tastings to fill in those holes...

But first, stouts!