Running A Beer Tasting Session With Six Glasses And A Notebook

A beer tasting session is a group of people drinking the same handful of beers in the same order and writing down what each one gave them, and the host's job is almost entirely decided before anybody opens a bottle. Choose a lineup that asks one question, pour the same amount into the same glasses, number them, and hand out paper with a grid drawn on it. Do that and six people will argue productively about beer for two hours. Skip it and you have an ordinary night of drinking that cost more than it needed to.

Choose A Lineup That Asks One Question

The lineups that work are the ones where the beers differ in exactly one respect, because a group can only reach a conclusion about a difference it was able to notice. A single style from four different breweries is the most reliable version of that and it works particularly well here, since putting a Vancouver pale ale beside a Victoria pale ale beside a Kelowna one tells you whether the words pale ale mean anything across this province. A second good option is a ladder, one variable moved in steps, such as four beers going from biscuit malt to roast malt at the same strength, or the same beer brewed with one, two and three times the hop addition.

A third option is the pair that should not work, two beers at opposite ends of something, a bone-dry sour next to a malty barleywine, or a cold-fermented lager next to a warm-fermented ale of the same colour and strength. Those lineups generate the most discussion, since nobody can hide behind a style description. What you should not do is buy six beers you individually like with nothing connecting them, because the resulting conversation is six separate first impressions and no comparison at all.

Set The Order And The Pours

Serve light before dark, low alcohol before high, clean yeast before wild or soured, and bitter before sweet. The reason is fatigue rather than etiquette, since a strong roasty beer in the second slot changes how the third tastes, and a soured beer early on will make everything after it seem flat. Keep the pours small and identical, somewhere around 150 millilitres, which is enough to swirl, smell, sip and warm up in the glass, and it means a six-beer lineup at normal strength is roughly three standard drinks per person by the end. That number is worth knowing on the night, because a session that turns into a binge produces notes nobody can read afterwards.

Chill everything, including the dark beers, and take them out only as the board reaches them, since warmth flattens aroma and a warm fourth beer is the usual reason a lineup goes to sleep halfway through. Put water and plain bread or unsalted crackers on the table, keep the candles off unless you like smelling dinner in your lager, and leave something with no alcohol in it within reach so that anybody can slow the evening down without announcing anything about why.

Number The Glasses And Draw The Grid

Numbering is the difference between a tasting and a pile of glasses. A wooden flight board with holes, or a paper mat with numbered slots, keeps the order straight and stops the moment halfway through when somebody asks which one was the smoky beer. If you do not own a board, small pieces of tape with a number written on each glass do the job, and a board you borrowed is fine too, as long as the numbers stay with the glasses rather than with the person holding them.

The sheet of paper matters more than the board, and you do not need anything printed to make it. Draw a grid with one column per numbered beer and five rows down the side, labelled appearance, aroma, taste, mouthfeel and verdict. The first four rows are what the beer gave you and the last one is whether you would buy it again, which is the only column anybody ever reads back. Keeping the rows fixed across every beer is the whole point of the exercise, because a sheet where glass one got six lines of description and glass five got the word nice is a sheet that tells you nothing a month later.

Nobody Reads Their Notes Out Until The Board Is Done

This is the rule that separates a session from a guided tour. Once the first glass is described out loud, every person at the table hears it and then tastes for it, and the rest of the evening is one confident drinker telling five other people what they are getting. Ask for silence until the last beer is poured, then go around the table one number at a time and let the disagreements sit there. Where two people wrote opposite things about the same glass, that is the most useful finding on the table, and it is worth spending twenty minutes on rather than moving along.

The host's job during the read-back is to keep the ranking separate from the description. Somebody saying a beer tastes like burnt toast is reporting, and somebody saying it is therefore bad is deciding, and the second kind of statement shuts the rest of the table up. If one guest insists on naming faults in every glass, hand them the pen and ask them to write it down instead, since the note has to survive being read back at the end of the night. Nobody at the table is an authority, including you, and a session where the host is quietly grading everybody is a session nobody hosts twice.

Add Food As A Sixth Round

Food belongs at the end rather than the start, because by then everybody knows what the beers taste like on their own and can notice what changes when a bite arrives. Pairings work in three directions and it is worth naming them on the sheet so the group can say which one happened. A complementary pairing shares something, such as a nutty brown ale beside hazelnut praline. A contrasting pairing puts something opposite next to something else, such as a tart soured beer beside a rich cheesecake, where the acidity slices the fat. A cutting pairing uses carbonation, bitterness or acidity to clear the palate between bites, which is why a dry pale ale and salty fried fish keep being ordered together.

Local examples are the useful ones to run, since everybody at the table has eaten them. A BC pale ale or India pale ale with cedar-plank grilled salmon is the classic version of a cutting pairing, where the bitterness and the hop oils go against the fat rather than matching it. Aged cheddar and a barleywine is complementary, both of them carrying toffee and nut. Vanilla ice cream with an imperial stout is the pairing that converts people who say they do not like dark beer, because the roast and the chocolate notes in the stout are already halfway to dessert. And if the lineup included a soured beer, pour the rest of it against something sweet at the end and let the table find out that the beer they found too sharp on its own was only missing sugar.

The Most Interesting Round Is A Beer That Went Wrong

Include one deliberately damaged beer and you will teach the table more than the other five combined. A green bottle left in sunlight produces the skunky, burnt-rubber note that comes from hops reacting with light, and a can that has been in the back of a warm fridge since winter gives the wet cardboard or sherry note that comes from age. Pour them at the end, unnumbered, and ask what is wrong rather than what it tastes like. People who cannot find a fault in a beer they like will find one instantly once they know they are looking, which is a useful thing to learn about your own palate and about how much of a verdict is expectation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the glass matter, or am I buying into marketing?

It matters for the same reason a white plate matters for photographing food, since you need to see colour and you need room for aroma to sit above the liquid. A clean, colourless glass with a stem keeps your hand off the bowl so the beer stays cold, and a tapered rim holds the aroma longer than a straight-sided tumbler. Any glass like that is fine, and a set of identical inexpensive stemmed glasses beats four expensive different ones, because a lineup only works if the glass is the thing that stayed the same.

What if two beers taste the same to me?

Write that down, because it is a result rather than a failure. Two beers that seem identical from different breweries is the most interesting finding a lineup can produce, and the discussion afterwards is about whether the style, the yeast or the malt supplier is doing the work. If everything tastes the same, check the pours and the temperatures before you blame the taster, since a warm, over-poured board flattens every difference on it.

How many people should I invite?

Five or six is the practical limit for a read-back that stays interesting, because at ten people each guest gets thirty seconds and the session turns into a series of small speeches. Two or three is better for a first attempt, since you are still learning how long the pours and the notes take, and a bigger night works better as two boards of four beers than as one board of eight.

Should the host know more than everybody else?

The host should know more about the format and less about the answers. Buying the beers, setting the order, drawing the grids and keeping the read-back honest are the hosting skills, and a host who already knows what every beer will taste like tends to run the evening as a test. Look up the brewery information after the notes are read rather than before the first pour, which is the difference between a session and a lecture with drinks.

What do I do with the sheets afterwards?

Keep them, since the value of written notes is the comparison across months rather than across glasses. Photograph each sheet, put the photos in one folder, and the next time a brewery sends something new you have a record of what your table thought of its last three attempts. A ranking that survives being written down by five people is worth more than a single confident opinion, and it is also the only part of the evening that gets better with repetition.

Run The Same Board Twice

The best version of this is to buy one more bottle of whatever the group argued about most and run the same lineup again a month later with the same people and the same grid. Half the notes will change, and the argument will be sharper the second time because everybody has had a month to think about glass number four. That repetition is the whole reason for writing anything down at a tasting, and it is also the only part of hosting a session that costs nothing.

Beer Tasting Flight Mats: What a Sheet of Paper Actually Fixes

A flight mat fixes one problem and pretends to fix a second. The one it fixes is bookkeeping: once you have four or five small pours in front of you, you lose track of which glass is which, and marked positions on a board solve that completely. The one it does not fix is the reason most tastings teach people nothing, which is that nobody wrote down what they tasted while the beers were still cold and their own attention was still sharp. A mat without notes is a placemat.

What To Write Instead Of A Score

Numbers feel like the serious part of tasting and are the least useful thing to record, because a 7 and an 8 mean nothing once you have ten of them. Three observations carry further. Say what the nose gives you before the first sip, in concrete terms like bread crust, grapefruit or black pepper rather than pleasant. Say how carbonated it feels and how dry the finish is, because those two facts explain most of why one beer makes you want the next sip and another does not. Then say whether the flavour kept going after you swallowed or stopped dead, which is the single most reliable sign of whether a beer is worth buying again.

Order matters as much as notes. Work from pale and low in alcohol toward dark and strong, and from clean-fermented beers toward anything soured or barrel-aged, because the later beers blunt your ability to judge the earlier ones and not the other way around. Keep water and something plain, like unsalted crackers, beside the flight, and taste the beers as they warm rather than rushing, since a cold pour hides aroma that a few minutes in the glass gives back.

The full method, including how many pours to pour and how to run a blind tasting without giving the game away, is in the tasting session guide, and the vocabulary for describing what you find is in training your palate.

How To Train Your Beer Tasting Palate And Vocabulary

A tasting palate is not a gift, it is a filing system: every time you put a beer in your mouth and then find the word for what happened, the next beer of that kind arrives with somewhere to land. Vocabulary is the same system from the other direction, because the reason most people can only say “smooth” or “nice” is not a dead tongue but an empty index. What follows is the routine tasting rooms and competition benches actually use, in the order they use it, and it costs nothing but attention.

Set Up Before You Pour

Taste is easily sabotaged before the first glass is lifted. Serve strong or dark beers a few degrees above fridge temperature, because warmth carries aroma and a very cold beer keeps its secrets. Use clean, well-rinsed glassware, since a film of dish soap and fingerprint oil read as flatness and dead foam. Have water and something neutral to chew between beers, and write things down the moment you notice them, because your memory of the third beer is already unreliable by the time the fifth one arrives.

Start With The Nose

Smell the beer twice, once flat before you swirl it and once after, because swirling drives volatile aromas upward and the gap between the two sniffs is itself information. Then sort what you get by source rather than reciting adjectives. Hops contribute citrus, pine, resin, tropical fruit or herbal and spicy notes depending on the variety. Malt contributes bread, biscuit, caramel, toast and roast. Yeast contributes banana, clove and pepper, or a clean nothing. Whatever the brewer adds, fruit, spice, coffee or oak, starts a separate sentence. Most of what you experience as flavour is retronasal smell, the aromas driven up the back of the nose as you swallow, which is why a beer held in the mouth with a pinched nose loses nearly all of its character.

Then Work The Palate

On the tongue itself only a few things are happening: sweetness from malt, bitterness from hops and roasted grain, sourness from acid, and occasionally a savoury or saline edge. The skill is separating those from texture and timing. Bitterness should be judged by where it sits, arriving at the front of the tongue in a well-rounded beer or lingering in the throat in an over-hopped one. Body comes from unfermented extract and protein, carbonation pricks and lightens, and oats, wheat and lactose add softness, so a beer can feel heavy while finishing dry or feel round while being sweet. Take a small sip, let it coat the whole tongue, then decide what stays after you swallow, because the finish is where most beers either make their argument or abandon it.

Build A Reference Library

Palate training is mostly smell practice outside the glass. Coffee grounds, citrus peel, pine resin, bread crust, butterscotch, black pepper and oregano are the exact notes a beer can carry, and one week of noticing them deliberately in your kitchen does more than a month of drinking without attention. Then compare on purpose. Buy two examples of one style from opposite ends of its range, drink them side by side, and ask both the same questions in the same order. Breweries sell flights for exactly this reason, and a paddle of small pours at the bar where the people who made the beer still work is the cheapest training available in this province.

Say It Out Loud Without Insulting The Brewer

Feedback has an order that keeps it useful: describe before you judge, because “this is too bitter” is worthless to a brewer while “the bitterness arrives at the front and never leaves” is a sentence somebody can work with. Off-flavours have names and causes, which is what makes them fair game rather than insults: lightstruck skunk from sun or lamps on a clear bottle, cardboard and sherry notes from oxygen and age, a buttery slick from diacetyl, a medicinal band-aid character from a wild yeast or a dirty line. Say what you taste, offer the cause as a question, and let the brewer decide whether the beer is wrong or merely not for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Many Beers Should A Tasting Session Include?

Somewhere between five and eight small pours keeps a session honest, because attention and the ability to remember the third beer both fall apart by the tenth. Half glasses are equipment rather than stinginess, since the point of the evening is comparison and a fifth beer tasted on a saturated palate teaches you nothing.

Is It Possible To Become A Professional Beer Taster?

Yes, though the route is smaller than the romance around it. Quality labs, sensory panels and the judging circuits around beer competitions all need people who can describe beer consistently, and there are certification programs that structure the study. The entry test is unglamorous and free: keep notes for a year and let somebody check whether two entries about the same beer agree.

Does Draft Really Taste Better Than Bottled?

Not automatically, and the usual explanation gets it backwards. What actually differs is temperature, freshness, light and oxygen exposure, and the cleanliness of the line: a well-kept keg poured cold beats an old bottle, and a dirty beer line will ruin anything faster than packaging ever could. Bottles and cans carry their own risks, mainly oxygen and light, so judge the specific beer rather than the format.

What Words Should I Stop Using?

Retire the effect words first. Crisp, smooth, refreshing and sessionable describe what a beer does to you rather than what is in it, and two people can mean opposite things by “crisp”. Replace each one with a source and an intensity, hop bitterness, bready malt, banana from a wheat beer yeast, and your sentence becomes comparable to somebody else's, which is the entire purpose of tasting vocabulary.

Why The Notes Matter More Than The Palate

The unglamorous truth of tasting is that the writing is the exercise. Notes turn a subjective evening into data you can check, which is the only way to know whether your palate is improving or merely becoming confident. Start with one line per beer, source and intensity, and reread the old lines every few months. Within a year you will be able to smell a beer and predict what the brewer put in it, and that, rather than any award or certification, is what the vocabulary was for.

Blood, Sweat & Beers: What Three Tasters Agree On

Three tasters who like each other will usually agree on which beer of the night is best and rarely agree on what the number means, and the second half of that sentence is the part worth keeping. An archived tasting night in this blog's own records had three British Columbia beers in it, and Kyle, Matt and Mike each scored them out of five. All three ranked the flight in the same order, from the Vancouver Island imperial red at 3.2 up to a Surrey imperial pale ale at 4.4 or 4.5. That ranking is the least interesting thing in the entry. The notes underneath the scores, and what has happened to two of the three breweries since, are the reason to reread the night.

What The Panel Recorded

The entry lists three opinions rather than declaring a winner, which is the honest way to publish a group tasting. Nobody weighted the scores, nobody dropped the low mark as an outlier, and the same three people worked through all four beers in the same order on the same night. That leaves the gap between tasters visible, and on every beer the gap is small enough that the result never came down to one dissenting glass.

Beer	Kyle	Matt	Mike	Gap between tasters
Thirty Years Imperial Red Ale, Vancouver Island Brewing	3.2	3.0	3.2	0.2
Sap Sucker Maple Porter, Fernie Brewing	3.9	4.2	3.7	0.5
Red Racer Imperial India Pale Ale, Central City	4.5	4.4	4.4	0.1
Bootlegger Ale, brewery not recorded	3.2	3.3	3.4	0.2

Thirty Years Imperial Red Ale, Vancouver Island Brewing

The panel had built the evening around this one and came away mildly disappointed, which is what a 3.2 from three friendly tasters usually means. The note describes a beer caught between sweetness and hops, with what reads like molasses doing the bridging, and the verdict was that the addition changed the flavour without improving it. Kyle's line, a solid start and a syrupy finish, is the whole review. Vancouver Island Brewing made it in Victoria and sold it as a bigger, well-hopped relative of the pale ale that had been the brewery's staple for years.

Two things have moved since. The Government Street brewhouse closed on 1 November 2024 after a 35 per cent rent increase, and production moved across to Phillips Brewing, so the Victoria address in the notes is a place with a history rather than a working plant. The vibrewery.com address the notes link has been superseded by vibrewing.com, where the company now publishes.

Sap Sucker Maple Porter, Fernie Brewing Co

This was the beer nobody expected to enjoy, poured for a panel that rarely reaches for a porter, and it drew the widest spread of the night at 3.7 to 4.2. The notes record a dark glass, gentle carbonation, and caramel and coffee running through it with the maple sitting behind the roast rather than on top of it. Matt's verdict, that a hint of maple makes it a genuinely Canadian beer and a good thing to pour over pancakes in the morning, is not something you can argue with. Two things to have straight if the name comes up: Fernie Brewing is in Fernie, in the East Kootenays, and Sap Sucker has been retired and is no longer brewed, so the seasonal the panel waited for is an archive item now.

Red Racer Imperial India Pale Ale, Central City

The top marks of the night, 4.4 and 4.5, went to a beer the panel admitted it had not expected from Surrey. The note is enthusiastic rather than careful: sweet malt and hops arriving together, and a finish long enough that all three tasters called it the best beer they had scored to that point. The brewery's own blurb promised grapefruit, tangerine and mango from whole-leaf hops and a long maturation before release. Mike's summary, smell check, taste check, alcohol check, it has it all, is not analysis, but it is honest about what a first great experience feels like.

Central City Brewers & Distillers has since gone through a change larger than a rebrand. The company ended up in a court-ordered sale, and Mark Anthony Group completed the purchase in February 2025. The Surrey plant that made the beer now sells it under the Homefield name, listed at Red Racer at Homefield Brewery, so the beer outlived the company name that made it.

The Beer Nobody Wrote Anything About

The panel scored a fourth beer, Bootlegger Ale, and filed three marks between 3.2 and 3.4 with no tasting note and no brewery recorded against it. That row is the most useful line in the whole table, because it shows what a score looks like when it carries no information. Nobody reading it later can tell whether the beer was fine, forgettable or flawed, and the closeness of the three marks only proves that three people agreed about something none of them bothered to describe.

What A Panel Score Can Tell You

Three people in one room produce an order you can trust more than the numbers on it, because that order survived a scale everybody uses badly. The absolute marks are another matter. The same beer can move half a point for the same drinker depending on the glass, the temperature and the position it was poured in, and a 3.2 in a flight where the top beer reached 4.5 mostly means third of three rather than a bad beer. Read a panel score for the ranking and the reasons attached to it, then let the decimal go.

What Happened When Everybody Became A Rater

Untappd does the same job at a scale no panel can reach. You log what you are drinking, rate it out of five in half-point steps, and leave the entry where your friends can see it. The difference is not that strangers are careless, since most of them are not, but that a crowd averages out everything a panel shares. Three tasters in one room had the same bottles at the same temperature with the same expectations going in, while a large set of check-ins mixes warm glasses, a dirty line, a long flight and two different production runs of the same label. A high crowd score is a weak argument that a beer is good. A crowd score that collapses against its own style is a decent argument that something is wrong with the can you are about to buy.

How To Run A Better Panel Night

• Put the bottles in paper bags or pour identical samples into unmarked glasses, since a label changes a score before the first sip arrives.
• Let everybody write a number before anybody talks, because the first confident opinion in the room quietly sets the range for the rest of the night.
• Score each beer against its own style rather than against the last glass, which is how a very good porter loses to an imperial IPA on the same table.
• Write one sentence with every score, because a number without a reason is the row nobody can use later.
• Include one beer nobody in the group would order, which is where panel nights produce surprises more often than a flight of favourites does.
• Keep the scale simple at half a point a time and stop arguing about whether a 4.2 is really a 4.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a five-point or a hundred-point scale better for scoring beer?

Five points in half-point steps is enough for three people in a living room, because it forces a decision without pretending to a precision nobody has. A hundred-point scale lets two tasters disagree by four points about the same glass and both be reasonable, which makes the average meaningless. The extra resolution only earns its keep when one person scores the same style repeatedly over a long stretch.

Does agreement between tasters prove the score is right?

Agreement says the panel is stable, not that the number is true, and this flight is the example. Three people who tasted together, in the same room, from the same bottles, landed within half a point on every beer, which is what it looks like when tasters influence each other and share reference points. Consistency is a property of the group rather than a measurement of the beer.

Should a brewery care about a low panel score?

It should care about the sentence attached to it. A 3.2 gives a maker nothing to work with, while a note saying the added sweetener left the finish heavy points at an exact decision in the recipe, and that is the kind of feedback a drinker rarely puts on a public rating feed.

Order, Reason, Then Ignore The Decimal

If you want to keep the useful part of a panel night, publish the ranking and the reasons and let the averages go. Two of the three breweries in this flight have changed out of recognition since the glasses were filled, one of the beers is no longer made, and the only thing in the record that still holds up is what three people said the beers tasted like. That is worth more than a decimal, and it is the part that outlives the brewery.