Beer Wednesday: The FIWK IPA Tasting

Towards the end of April, Aaron came down to LA. We decided to celebrate this occasion by assembling a crew and drinking some beers. Aaron loves IPAs so we focused the tasting mainly around those. Here is the list:

IPAs
- Longhammer IPA by Redhook (6.5% ABV)
- Blind Pig IPA by Russian River (6.1%)
- Pliny the Elder IPA by Russian River (8%)
- Torpedo IPA by Sierra Nevada (7.2%)
- Hop Ottin' IPA (organic) by Anderson Valley (7%)
- Big Daddy IPA by Speakeasy (6.5%)
- Ruination IPA by Stone (7.7%)


Non-IPAs
- Noble Pilsner by Sam Adams (5%?)
- McGarvey's Scottish Ale by Left Coast (5%)
- El Camino (Un)Real Black Ale by Stone, Firestone Walker, and 21st Amendment (9.5%)
- Red & White Ale by Dogfish Head (10%)
- Victory at Sea Vanilla Coffee Imperial Porter by Ballast Point (10%)


Pictures are forthcoming. Feel free to add your comments in the meantime, especially if you've had these beers before.

Beer Wednesday: Our benchmarks

These beers are all at least OK and possibly good depending on your tastes and preferences. If you care about any of our other posts regarding beer, such as the Ballast Point - Victory at Sea or the Stone Ruination IPA, then you have surely tried some of these beers as you have explored the spectrum to identify your beer tastes. If you consider yourself a beer drinker, but don't care about those posts and have never tried any of the above beers, then you surely drink weak macro brews whose only purpose is to deliver alcohol from an aluminum can to your blood stream. We'll give these a 10 on the chugability scale and a 1 on the taste scale. It would be an insult to good beer to even consider rating these on any other scale.

As for the beers pictured...a few initial thoughts before opening it up to the floor for multiple opinions. (If there is any defining characteristic here at FIWK, it's multiple opinions.)