Drink It In, Nashville! The Idea.

Locally brewed craft beers have been popping up all over the country in the last fifteen years. Microbrews are no longer limited to the likes of Denver and Seattle. Today even citizens of small cities such as Missoula, MT and Chapel Hill, NC can enjoy a hometown brew.
Nashville has not been left out of this nationwide trend. To date, the Music City hosts three brew pubs and one full brewery.

Each of these has been financially well received. All are holding on to their share of the market, if not expanding.
Yazoo, Nashville’s lone complete brewery, has recently been exporting its kegs to Memphis as well as various locations throughout Davidson County. It has also been trucking bottles of its flagship beers (Dos Perros and Pale Ale) to destinations in both Davidson and Shelby counties. Their next goal is to jump the stateline and make their brews available in Birmingham, AL.

Blackstone has also been sending kegs and bottles full of flavorful concoctions throughout the middle Tennessee area. It is the lone brew pub in Nashville to reach beyond its walls and share its products with other venues.

Thus far, Boscos and Big River, Nashville’s two other brew pubs, have remained satisfied with the sales generated inside their respective buildings.
This all translates into opportunities for some good drinking in Nashville. Nashville Feed wanted to find out where the tastiest of those opportunities lies.

To discover this, we could have compared honors bestowed on each brewery. Each place brags of awards. In addition to scattered other accolades, all have received recognition from the Great American Beer Festival. But this isn’t about what attendees of an exclusive national beer festival in Colorado think; this is about the tastes of Nashvillians.

And an article solely about certificates of achievement would be catatonically boring for me, the writer, as well as you, the reader.

We also might have assembled a panel of middle Tennessee’s most well regarded beer aficionados to sample each microbrew. But are these people actually representative of the drinkers in Nashville? The city has a very diverse population of people enjoying the local brews on any given night. Many of them don’t know what gravity or malt is, but they know what tastes right.

So we opened up the voting to whomever would like to join us for at least one stop on a four part tasting journey through Nashville. We felt that this approach would give us the most accurate representation of what the city’s drinkers actually preferred, as well as giving the Nashville Feed writers an excuse to knock back a few pints of fine ales ourselves.

Our tasters put themselves into one of three categories:

Occasionally sample something with taste and character
Enjoy microbrews, but not real knowledgeable
Beer snob

There were two other options on the ballot, but no one wanted to admit to being a fan of corporate beers or a lord of the fine brews. Thus, our survey was conducted by a sample of solid, middle of the road beer drinkers.

Tasters were asked to sample whichever beer they wanted. They then were instructed to comment on the beer and give it a rating from one to five (five being the Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp of beers) on a ballot provided for them. Additional information was also collected, such as intoxication level at the time of sampling and notes on ambiance, service, location and any other miscellaneous ranting the voter wished to offer.

Not all beers offered at each location show up in the results. Some selections may not have been sampled by anyone on the panel, or the beer may have been sampled but no ballot was submitted for it.

At least two ballots per beer had to be submitted for that particular beverage to be considered. This was to insure that one person’s fickle tastes or established love for one selection did not unfairly slant the results.

Our study was in no way intended to represent any sort of accurate system of measuring beer quality. It was put together solely so that we could drink lots and get a vague, unprofessional, nonbinding concept of where the good beer is made.

With that disclaimer in mind, below is links to all the articles in the series:

Tags: beer, brew pub, brewery, microbrew, nashville