San Diego Part 1

That's a good question. I believe the order is important. If were to drink a lighter lager after drinking a heavy stout, it would be much harder for us to distinguish the more subtle flavors of the lighter beer. So generally, I try to order the beers from lightest to darkest. Sometimes for scheduling reasons I'll hold a beer until later in the podcast because it coincides with some other discussion. The lightest to darkest thing helps, but only to an extent, because any beer (or food) consumed before another beer is going to have an effect. We try to clear the palette, take a few sips of the second beer before describing it, but often times you will hear our descriptions change a little bit over the first couple of sips as we adjust to the new beer. The amount of alcohol has an effect as well, but not to the same extent. In most cases we are splitting a beer between 3-5 people, so we can review several beers before we've had the equivalent of 'one beer each'. So it doesn't equal out to 5 beers in one hour of show. When Jeff is on Skype by himself, then he is tackling 5 beers by himself, but he saves most of the beer to take photos later for the website. If the beers are particularly strong for a particular show, then the alcohol can have an effect on the last beer or two. My guess is, in that case we are more apt to say a strong beer is more drinkable because we're accustomed to the alcohol. But I think identification of flavors and descriptions can actually be helped with a little bit of alcohol in the system, to a point. Obviously, too much beer and we end up with a worthless wreck of a podcast that never sees the light of day. Thanks for the correction on my San Diego geography and thanks for listening!

Quick question and comment. As you guys mentioned in the podcast (and probably in every podcast), a lot of beer is consumed in one night. How much do you think the order in which you drink the beers,and the amount of alcohol consumption influences each persons opinion of the beers? And for the record, Pacific Beach is in San Diego which would make it a neighborhood of SD, not a suburb. Good podcast guys