6th Annual Spring Festival Of Craft Breweries

The normally relaxed Spring Festival Of Craft Breweries was filled to overflowing with beer lovers of all ages and tastes. By the official start time of five o'clock both of our bars were packed with eager tasters. Against our usual "drop-in" philosophy we we forced to institute a line-up for the better part of three hours. We managed to serve about four hundred and fifty people at the event.

Even though the axiom "there is no accounting for taste" was never more true than at this event, we will still attempt a numerical summary. We were featuring forty-three brews from thirty-two producers including 12 cask beers and two ciders. Two finished with top honours and median scores of eight: Black Oak's Ten Bitter Years and Wellington Russian Imperial Stout. Both of these clocked in at a whopping 8.0% alcohol and made as big an impression on festival goers. In all seventeen beers were deemed purchase worthy by the majority with median scores of seven or more. Many of the brews received both perfect tens and extremely imperfect zeros from different raters with decidedly different tastes.

The most sampled beer was the cask dispensed Flying Monkeys Smash-Bomb Atomic IPA. Many top finishers from past festivals were just about ignored with St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout, Durham Hop Addict, and C'est What Al's Cask Ale not even making the minimum number of samples rated to be in the running.

For the third festival in a row we can claim that it was our busiest festival ever: we sold 5915 samples. That amounts to about one sample served every three seconds. There have been many requests to make C'est What beer festivals two day events so that we can accommodate the growing number of craft beer aficionados in our fair city. We will consider this for the fall festival - stay tuned for details...

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Scores for products rated by 30 or more people, maximum score is ten

Samples

Std Dev

Median

56

1.5

8

Wellington Russian Imperial Stout

33

2.3

8

70

2.1

7

55

2.0

7

52

1.8

7

51

2.0

7

37

1.4

7

33

2.0

7

32

2.0

7

30

2.0

7

64

2.3

7

56

2.5

7

52

2.4

7

1.7

7

2.7

6

1.9

6

1.9

6

2.3

6

1.7

6

2.6

6

2.4

6

2.5

6

1.9

6

2.4

6

1.9

6

2.3

6

2.0

6

2.3

6

1.8

6

2.5

5

2.5

5

2.5

5

2.4

5

2.8

2

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