Steve Koenemann

Some Bits and Pieces of Ratebeer’s Best

Like many of you, I really look forward to the Ratebeer Best lists being released every year. It gives me a chance to look at the brewing industry as a whole and see who was hot and who was not in the previous year. I have taken some time to look through the various lists released last week and have a few comments and observations about their content this year.

First of all I’d like to call to your attention the appearance of one of Vermont’s own brewers, the Hill Farmstead Brewery, on these these lists. Hill Farmstead is listed twice on Ratebeer’s Best; as the top new brewery in the world and also for his truly wonderful Edward Pale Ale. If you have followed some of my previous articles here, you know that Shaun Hill’s small brewery, located in the tiny town of Greensboro in north-central Vermont is one of several shining stars among the 21 breweries that can be currently found in this small state. The appearance of Hill Farmstead on these lists is but the latest in an already impressive accumulation of accolades and awards that this young brewer has earned over the last few years. At last year’s World Beer Cup, three of Shaun’s beers, created by Shaun when he was working for Danish brewer Nørrebro Bryghus, won medals (2 golds and a silver) at this lofty international competition. If you look through the Ratebeer ratings for Shaun’s beers you will quickly see that Vermonters are not the only ones that are in love with Shaun’s creations and I truly believe that many of his beers would stand up well against a goodly portion of the other beers on Ratebeer’s Best. For many of you, however, Hill Farmstead beers might be some of the best beers that you will have never tried, as Shaun currently only runs about a 7-barrel operation and, although I know that some of his beers have appeared in Philly and NYC, most of Shaun’s beers do not make it very far out of Vermont… and that is fine with me. Come to Vermont and find out why Hill Farmstead rightly deserves their spot among the other brewers on Ratebeer’s Best.

The second observation that I have and I am not the first to point this out (See the 2010 article by fellow HopPress writer K.M. Weaver), no less than 34 of the top 50 beers on the list are Stouts or Imperial Stouts. There is probably nobody that likes a good Impy better than I do, but one would think from looking at this list that there are no other great styles of beer other than stouts… and that is clearly just not the case. While the other 16 beers that make up this list are of other styles, although far too few in number (my opinion), I was gratified to see some IPAs and Sour beers appear on the list; two other styles of beer that I enjoy very much. I hope that the folks that put together this list and beer raters in general are a little more open minded in the future about what constitutes a great beer. Great beers can and do include stouts, but that designation of a beer’s greatness can and should encompass much more than that (Understand? ¿entiendes lo que quiero decir? Verstehen? Vous comprenez? Dong ma?).

I was quite surprised (amazed?) to see Lost Abbey’s Framboise de Amorosa on the list. Having grown up in a house here in Vermont that had a huge patch of raspberry bushes in the back yard, I really have a soft spot in my heart for anything that has raspberries in it and that applies to beer as well. I have not had a chance to try this beer, but you can bet that it will go on my “Want” list right after I finish this article.

The last thing that I was left thinking as I looked over these lists was just how long it was going to take me to find and sample all of these great beers on the lists. The fact is that some of these beers and even some of the brewers may not even exist by the time that I have an opportunity to get to them all. I am not too stressed about this, mind you, but it does give one pause to hear Joe Tucker talk about the more than 130,000 beers and 10,000 brewers *currently* found in the Ratebeer database; and I am certain those numbers are growing. The world of craft beer is a huge one these days and growing rapidly. That is, without any question, due to the hard-working people that make up this industry and it’s good to see more than a few of them receive the praise that they truly deserve from the likes of Ratebeer and others.

I have no realistic hope of sampling all of the different beers on this year’s Ratebeer’s Best list in the near future and I will probably only sample a tiny fraction of the total number of beers listed in the Ratebeer database in my entire lifetime (the Ratebeer top rater currently has just under 20,000 ratings, which is amazing in itself), but in spite of all of that, I know in my heart that there are still a large number of beers that I will drink in the future that will end up on the VTHopHead’s Best list and I will surely take the time to enjoy and savor all of those beers I try in between those that I think are “great”. Do yourself a favor, print out these lists (or download them to your phone) before you head out to your favorite bottle-shop the next time and see if you can locate just one beer on these lists of what many believe are Ratebeer’s Best Beers…. I doubt that you’ll be sorry if you find one!

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