The Beer Champions League
March 10th, 2005
Gentlemen (for yes, today I address the males of my readership), the time has come. I have a vision, a vision that together we can find, once and for all time, which beer is The Greatest.
Behold!
What is it?
Okay, back to reality. The Beer Champions League (BCL) is a competitive framework for objectively judging the relative quality of beers, with the ultimate aim of determining which is best.
In practice, it’s a blind beer taste-off with the same structure as the actual UEFA Champions League competition (more on this below). Finally (and crucially) the BCL takes place over three key evenings of actual Champions League football – allowing two great pillars of WASP male lifestyle, beer and football, to mix with the kind of psuedo-scientific endeavour that is not only right up my street, but should get similarly anal males salivating into their keyboards even as they read this.
I should make it absolutely clear, I have already discussed the idea in the pub and it was toasted – it’s definitely going to happen. This is no idle chit-chat.
Philosophy
The philosophical underpinning of the BCL is to find out which beer or beers we’d actually enjoy drinking more than our habitual choices. For this reason the competing beers are selected from (for the most part) those most commonly available in the pubs, bars and restaurants we frequent. There’s no point including a rare but lush Belgian brew if you can only get it in Brussels or the speciality offy on Waterloo street.
The beers
By ‘Beer’ I mean bottled lagers. This is for the simple reason that I drink bottled lagers. For your own champions league (and I readily expect, no, require you to run one yourselves) you may substitute your beverage of choice – ales, wines, whiskeys etc. will all suffice. The format is so flexible that I reckon you could probably have a cheese champions league if you wanted. But somehow that doesn’t quite have the same appeal (although now I think about it… hmmm.)
32 beers are selected to compete. To choose these beers I believe a consensus has to be reached amongst those participating. For this reason I have produced a long-list of 40-odd beers, which needs to be distributed, and then feedback collated into a final runners list of 32. Participants should mark their top 8 ‘seeded’ beers (from which an averaged list of 8 seeds will be determined), and every participant can name a ‘wild-card’ beer which will definitely be included (allowing some scope for rarer beers in the competition).
In a break from the UEFA paradigm I have decided to allow International beers, not just those from Europe. There are simply too many beers that I want to include that don’t come from Europe (Asahi, for example, or Kingfisher).
Mechanics of the event
Blind taste-offs are actually quite hard to arrange. Removing the labels on the bottles won’t do as some bottles are very distinctive and hence identifiable. Regrettably, I believe that the only way to preserve anonymity of the beers is to decant them into jugs. This isn’t ideal as not only will the vital sensation of drinking from a cool bottle be gone, but I’m going to need a lot of jugs.
Which leads nicely into the fact that an adjudicator figure will be required. This Collina like role falls to me: I will have to sort out the beers and make sure everyone knows what they’re doing. Printing out score sheets to fill in should help this somewhat.
The format
The event takes place over three nights. Night 1 is the first group stage, where 16 beers compete for 8 places in the knockout stage. Night 2 is a repeat of night one for the remaining 16 beers. Night 3 is a straight knockout round, where the winners from nights 1 and 2, randomly drawn in pairs, battle it out in the classic pyramid knockout structure. One beer will emerge covered in glory, even as our chins and shirts will emerge covered in beer.
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Night 1
This night takes place on the evening of the second leg of the UEFA Champions League quarter-finals, Tuesday 12 April 2005. This is the deciding night of the quarters and should make for an exciting game. Be assured, the tele will be on whilst we conduct the taste-offs.
The format of the group stage seems quite complicated, but it follows the champions league group stage exactly and so should be familiar:
The 16 beers are separated into 4 groups of 4 (groups A,B,C,D). One seeded beer appears in each group.
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Group A taste-off, Night 1
Group A consists of 4 beers, a seeded brew and three others drawn at random. The group taste-off consists of 6 beer matches: Each participant has to blind taste every possible pair of beers in the group (6 combinations) and rate the match either as a win for a beer (3 points) a loss (0 points) or a draw (1 point each). Each participant – i.e. each mate in the front room – repeats this process, so ultimately (for e.g. 5 mates) there should be 30 results: 5 (1 for each participant) x 6 (possible pairings of beers) = 30. This gives every participant a say in every outcome, and the match scores can be averaged (or even just added) to determine which beers go through. The top two beers from each group proceed to the knockout stage (night 3) – just like the real Champions League.
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Groups B-D taste-offs, Night 1
Repeat the above for groups B, C and D.
By the end of night 1 each participant will have conducted 24 taste-offs and 8 beers will have reached the knockout stage (the top and second placed beer in each group).
24 taste-offs is a lot. I reckon that something like 1/6 of a bottle x2 might be consumed in each taste-off. That’s 8 beers per night per participant: quite a lot. It’s possible that the quality of results will decline as the night proceeds, and even that one’s ability to make objective judgements on taste will fade. But that’s the way it is. It’s like a player tiring at the end of the night.
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Night 2
Night 2 is a repeat of night 1 for the second 16 beers. 8 more beers reach the knockout stage. Night 2 takes place on the second leg of the UEFA Champions League semi-finals, Tuesday 3 May 2005. This too, should make a very exciting backdrop to the proceedings.
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Night 3
The Beer Champions League finals. This occurs on the night of the Champions League final, Wednesday 25 May 2005. Just like in the actual Champions League knockout stages, a draw is made to pair-off beers into matches. A straight drink-off ensues with the winner progressing. With 16 beers competing this makes 4 rounds of competition, and 15 drink-offs to be conducted by each participant.
When all is done a single beer will have won through: Champion of beers.
Two small pyro’s filled with thousands of brightly coloured flakes of metallic dandruff will then detonate on either side of my kitchen table. Participants will climb on chairs holding their beers aloft, or collapse to a heap beating their fists against the parquet. And we will all, hopefully, have had a good time, enjoyed the football, become slightly drunk and possibly, maybe, perhaps have changed our drinking habits a little.
It will all have been worth it.