Spectre’s Sayings

A friend of mine challenged me to make a list of the top 10 beers. I told him that I hadn’t had every beer in the world, so that was impossible. He then amended his challenge to me for me to list the top 10 beers that I have had.

A very difficult proposition, since my tastes and preferences do change over time. And really, how do you compare a porter to a hefeweizen? But I thought I’d give it a shot.

I started out by making a list of what I thought were truly “world-class” beers. I ended up with a list of 20 such beers. Then I tried to put them in the order of how much I enjoyed them. I’m sure I made mistakes doing this. And deciding that this beer belonged in the top 10 and that beer belonged in the second 10 was difficult and painful. But, in the end, this is what I came up with:

10. Belhaven St. Andrew’s Ale
9. Goose Island Christmas Ale
8. Millstream Colony Oatmeal Stout Lager
7. Hacker-Pschorr Weisse
6. Samuel Smith’s Organic Ale
5. Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter
4. Fuller’s 1845
3. Weihenstephaner Hefe Weissbier
2. Ayinger Brau-weisse
1. Westmalle Trappist Ale Dubbel

Honorable mention: Arcadia Ales’ London Porter Ale, Rogue Shakespear Stout, Samuel Smith’s Organically Produced Lager Beer, Samuel Smith’s Pure Brewed Lager, Hofbrau Munchen Original Lager Beer, Erdinger Oktoberfest Weizen, Fuller’s London Pride, Fuller’s London Porter, and Spanish Peaks Brewing’s Black Dog Ale.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 9:36 am and is filed under Beer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.