Another minute of fame.

My local watering-hole had its second annual “Taste That Beer!” competition last night. Well, not a competition, exactly, as Virginia’s alcoholic beverage control laws frown on such things. And certainly not something that would award prizes, either, other than bragging rights. But a blind tasting of 12 different beers, and you try to determine the style and the particular beer.

At last year’s not-a-competition-as-that-would-be-illegal, you may recall, I came in second, one point behind a professional beer writer buddy. So I claimed that he won the professional division (consisting of him) and I won the amateur division (consisting of the other 39 participants present).

This year’s format was different from last year’s (where all you got was the beer, and you had to dredge your memory to come up with styles and beer names): they had a list of 120 beers, broken into 12 groups of 10, one group for each style. Once you guessed (ah, I mean “determined”) the style, you had to pick the actual beer from the 10 possibilities. They awarded 4 points per beer: 1 for the correct style, 1 for the correct location of the brewery (state, if U.S., otherwise country), and 2 for the correct beer. Thus, a total of 48 points were possible.

As usual, it was a lot of fun, in a humbling sort of way. Since you knew what the 12 styles were, you had the opportunity to second-guess yourself. The beer that you thought was the hefeweisen when you had it in the first round might well have been the Belgian light malt when you try a beer three rounds later that tastes more like what a hefeweisen really should taste like. And they admitted that they were going to include some difficult beers to identify, or even to classify.

Once again, I didn’t win. The winner had a total of 11 points. (Yes, out of 48.) Once again, I came in second, one point back. The good news, I suppose, is that the winner wasn’t the professional beer writer (who had 8 points). And thus the bad news is that I can’t even claim to have won the amateur division.

Unlike last year, I had a couple of regrets about the answers I eventually turned in. The one beer I correctly identified was the Smuttynose Smuttinator doppelbock – and I misremembered the state that Smuttynose is brewed in. It’s in New Hampshire, of course, and not Maine as I recalled. (My excuse is that I was remembering having fresh Smuttynose when I visited friends in Maine. Yeah, not that great an excuse.) If I had gotten the state correct, I’d have tied for first, and there would have been a sudden-death taste-off. Or something.

The bigger regret was failing to identify the brown ale. At least I got the style correct. It turns out to have been the Cottonwood Low Down Brown, which is my favorite brown ale and from one of my favorite breweries. But it didn’t taste quite like I remembered – a bit thinner body than I recalled – so I ruled it out, and picked something from the other side of the country. If I had gotten it correct, that would have been three more points in my column, and a clear win. Alas.