Portland’s Favorite IPA

The Oregon Hophouse has recently been running a little experiment.  They invited patrons to try a flight of twelve IPAs and vote on their favorites.  In a certain sense, the free market functions as a way of determining patrons’ favorite beers, too.  But in that case, people may be influenced by price, ad campaigns, the image of a brewery, peer pressure, or proximity.  Here it was just twelve unmarked beers and the palates of the tasters.  The flight contained:

• Barley Brown’s Pallet Jack
• Boneyard RPM
• Breakside IPA
• Crux Outcast
• Double Mountain Hop Lava
• Fort George Vortex
• Gigantic IPA
• Goodlife Descender
• Hop Valley Alphadelic
• Laurelwood Workhorse
• Migration Luscious Lupulin
• Ninkasi Total Domination

Care to guess which one came out on top?  Before I tell you, last year the champeen was Boneyard–but the beers weren’t served blind.  This year, 864 people cast a ballot and the results looked like this: 

Barley Brown Pallet Jack: 160 (18.5%)*
Breakside IPA:132 (15.2%)
Boneyard RPM: 123 (14.2%)

I’m interested …