My understanding was that these meetings at ATG can facilitate us spending more time on focusing on sensory evaluation and training our palates.
Drinking commercial craft beer and discussing is a great and probably the primary way to do that, but there are other options, too.
-If ATG has the right beers available we can try multiple beers of a particular style, or multiple beers from a single brewery to try and get a handle on any "house character", but a lot more options open up if we're not RESTRICTED to only commercial beer tastings.
I think that learning about the flavors imparted by particular ingredients and processes is one of the most interesting parts of sensory evaluation of beer. -A parallel "single hop" tasting is incredibly educational, but I doubt we can get more than 2 or 3 single hopped beers at Against the Grain; if home brew options are on-the-table we can do things like this. (Or the same beer brewed to the same color but with varying quantities of different color crystal malts; a Porter/Stout with chocolate malt vs. black malt vs. roast barley.)
I don't want to hijack the purpose of the meetings if this isn't the purpose but I was certainly under the impression that this sort of thing was "in scope" for these. Are these just beer drinking meetings or more like sensory evaluation meetings? Is only commercial beer "in scope" or do we have the desire/flexibility to do the other stuff, too?
Adam
