Best IPAs in America (Parish in the top 5)

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A Note on Beer Freshness Obviously, when it comes to tasting IPAs, freshness is a factor that looms large, so allow me to address it directly here. Throughout the many days of preliminary tasting, we attempted to drink daily heats of beer that corresponded roughly to when each beer reached the Paste office. It’s by no means a perfect system, but it’s what we have. Before the finals tasting, we also reached out to all of the breweries in the top 25 to inform them that their beer had made the finals, and offered them an opportunity to send in fresh beer if they chose to do so for the final.

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A Note on Beer Acquisition As in most of our blind tastings at Paste, the vast majority of these IPAs were sent directly to the office by the breweries that choose to participate, with additional beers acquired by us via locally available purchases and the occasional trade. We always do our best to reach out to breweries we’re aware of that make exemplary versions of particular styles, but things always do slip through the cracks. We apologize for a few significant omissions that we couldn’t acquire, either due to seasonality or market shortages. There will never be a “perfect” tasting lineup, much as we continue to try.

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Rules and Procedure

— This is a tasting of IPAs, largely determined by how the breweries chose to label their products. All beers had to be labeled as “IPA” in some capacity. When in doubt, we simply allow a brewery’s marketing to define a beer’s style, and expect them to stick to the designation they’ve chosen.
— There was a strict limit of 8% ABV on submissions. All beers under 8% ABV were accepted. All beers of 8% ABV or above were not. Beers labeled as “DIPA” were accepted if their ABV was still under 8%.
— All types of adjuncts and flavorings were allowed. Fruited IPAs, brettanomyces IPAs, etc.

— There was a limit of only two entries per brewery. The beers were separated into daily blind tastings that approximated a sample size of the entire field.

— Tasters included professional beer writers, brewery owners, brewmasters and beer reps. Awesome, style-appropriate glassware is from Spiegelau.

— Beers were judged completely blind by how enjoyable they were as individual experiences and given scores of 1-100, which were then averaged. Entries were judged by how much we enjoyed them for whatever reason, not by how well they fit any kind of preconceived style guidelines. As such, this is not a BJCP-style tasting.

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Seems like this is the mindset of many people, that Treehouse/Trillium produce everything outstanding and anything that is ranked ahead is wrong.

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If I was a bit snooty I could almost say the same thing about Great Notion (I can't because snooty isn't my thing)

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that Treehouse/Trillium produce everything outstanding and anything that is ranked ahead is wrong.

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