PintPicker

Over 100 beers at the Cambridge Blue beerfest and the PintPicker profiles are on the barrel ends provoking comments like: "I saw this in the Whalebone in Norwich the other week...". Favourite beers so far are Tydd Steam Barn Ale (3.9%) "Crisp and refreshing with a biscuity bite and grapefruit finish" and Dark Star American Pale Ale (4.7%) "Splendid pale ale, massively hoppy with a big grapefruit burst at the finish" both warranting a 9.

The Whalebone Beer festival kicks off this Friday with around 80 beers both on gravity and handpump. PintPicker profiles feature colourfully in the tasting notes and will be gracing the barrel ends too, making it very easy for punters to pick their preferred pint! (Try saying that after two or three...)

The tasting notes can be downloaded from http://www.pintpicker.co.uk/assets/docs/whalebone_beerlist.pdf - quite a large file, around 3Mb. Looking through the list, the summery pale and golden ales predominate, but there's something in there for everyone, including some breweries that were new to us, as well as some old favourites.

The Festival runs from 5th - 14th June giving us plenty of time to sample a good range from across the length and breadth of the land.

Update: the programmes arrived late from the printers on Friday (around 4pm in fact) and were printed in b/w instead of colour but they still looked pretty good. Beer of the Festival for me was Rooster's Elderflower (3.9%): "Light and florally hoppy over a crunchy biscuit base. Sweetish at the start fading to an astringent dry finish. Tasty and impressive for a 3.9" I gave it 9/10. Also worthy of mention, scoring 8/10, were Blue Monkey Gold (aka Evolution) (4.3%): "Vegetally hoppy with citrus fruitiness"; Dartmoor IPA (4.5%): Deep golden, refreshing with some citrus and good hoppiness"; Wizard Lundy Gold (4.1%): "Florally, biscuity and refreshingly light" and Ascot Alligator Ale (4.6%): "Sweet upfront with hedgerow and spicy hops and light orchard fruits - oranges, pears and apricots".

Back at the ever-busy Cambridge BeerFest on Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 May. Lots of new breweries (27 at the last count) and far too many ales to taste, but we had a good go nevertheless, racking up 21 over the two sessions. My absolute favourite was the very pale Bowman Eldorado (with elderflowers, geddit?) and truly great for a 3.5% with its tangly, nettley hops and lovely floral and citric aromas. I really couldn't fault it and had to award it a coveted 10. Highland Scapa Special (4.2%) merited 9, with citric hops and tannic astringency combining to give a really refreshing and exceptional pale ale. Also worthy of mention were the ones that scored 8: Norfolk Cottage's Festival Special (4.3%) was very special indeed with tobacco and pepper plus a great vegetal straw bale flavour (fancy a roll in the hay? - here it is, in a glass) and let's hope they continue to produce it; Jarrow Rivet Catcher (4.0%) with good bitterness, buttery mouthfeel and tangy hops (what's not to like?); Wagtail English Ale (4.2%) zingy with spicy hops and a good burnt butterscotch flavour; Bays Gold (4.3%) with hedgerow hops and a slightly fizzy citrus zing plus good body too; Green Tye Union Jack (3.6%) caramelly on the nose, burnt toffee on the palate and hoppy too, a great session bitter; Buntingford Golden Plover (3.8%) biscuity, hoppy and refreshingly dry; Devil's Dyke No 7 Pale Ale (4.1%) deep golden and nicely bitter, biscuity with citrus zest; and finally, Mill Green Mawkin Mild (2.9%) very dark with chocolatey aromas and burnt toast on the palate, dry and amazing for a 2.9.
The Festival Programme was a bit light on detail this year; "sorry no tasting notes available" was a bit of a recurrent theme. They should have used PintPicker!

The Ketts Tavern in Norwich is holding a MayFest from Friday 22 to Sunday 31 May and landlord Kevin Hopkins has been busy sourcing ales from the West Midlands. Kevin runs four beer and sausage festivals a year at the Ketts, usually with a geographical theme, plus another four at its sister pub the Rose. This is the first time he's going to use the PintPicker profiles alongside his regular descriptions; he says that colour is the first thing that people want to know when choosing a beer so it will be very useful to have each beer's profile (coloured accordingly and printed out in colour) displayed by the bar. Beers so far confirmed are from Black Country Ales, Olde Swan, Morton, Holden's, Sarah Hughes, Toll End and Windsor Castle plus local ones from Buffy's, Fat Cat, Humpty Dumpty, Brandon, Tipples, Norfolk Square, Elgood's, Wolf, Nethergate and Woodforde's.

There are currently 18 ales with "Spring" in their name in the PintPicker database, so we thought we'd have a look at the data to see if we can draw any conclusions about what characteristics a 'generic' Spring beer might have. To cut a long story very short we've found that the average Spring beer is 4.2% ABV, golden in colour, medium bodied and not too bitter with a biscuity base, some floral hoppiness and zesty citrus notes. In fact, it looks like this:

The closest beer to this in the database is Norfolk Square's Stiletto (99% similar) "a single hop brew using a fragrant and flowery aroma hop, with a citrus character". And the closest Spring beer is Ramsbury Spring Barley (94%) making this the most generic of Spring Ales.
Check out the complete list of Spring beers on the PintPicker site.

Otto is our semi-automated beer-bot and he's quite clever. He compiles flavour profiles of each beer by pooling, cross-referencing and collating a number of data-sources: the brewer's description; beer festival tasting notes; quantitative data such as IBUs for bitterness and SRM/Lovibond and EBC to determine colour; other classification scheme descriptions; tasting notes from blogs and wikis and a wide range of other sources. He has an extensive vocabulary of beer-flavour descriptors that are mapped to each of the PintPicker flavour attributes on a quantitative scale. He ascribes each source a Trust Quotient (based on how closely that source's descriptions match his own) and applies a set of conflict resolution algorithms wherever he encounters inconsistent information (which is quite common in the brewing and beer-tasting world). He's remarkably accurate (check out his profiles on the site) and unlike us, he can sample loads of beers without falling over! He is a unique example of AI (ale intelligence). But he's not infallible, so all his reviews are thoroughly checked by a human before being uploaded to the site.

The White Lion in Norwich has the accolade of being the first to use the PintPicker beer "footprints" and tasting notes for its own very first festival. May there be many more! Initial reactions seem pretty positive (both to the festival and the footprints) and a couple of the local CAMRA guys seemed impressed. The footprints themselves appeared to be fairly self-explanatory (although one festival-goer was overheard to say that perhaps you needed a PhD to work it out - but retracted that later once he'd worked it out all by himself and then went on to say that he'd found himself in agreement with every beer he'd tasted so far!) The tasting notes can be downloaded from the White Lion website here: http://www.individualpubs.co.uk/whitelion/festival200902-beerlist.pdf

My particular favourite was Brew Company's Slaker (3.8) a fabulous pale ale that drinks way above its strength and has that wonderful combination of refreshing citrussy hoppyness and biscuity malt that I love.

So thanks to Ralph Holland and the team for organising a great four day event and we look forward to the next one in due course.

Beers from different breweries often can have the same names. Obvious examples are the ubiquitous Ale, Bitter, Best, Best Bitter, Blonde, Dark Mild, Gold, Mild, IPA, Original, Porter, Special, Stout and Summer Ale, but there are also more unusual names cropping up in more than one brewery: Against the Grain (Oulton, Wold Top); Amarillo (Crouch Vale, Milk Street); Apprentice (Wibblers, Wizard); Black Bull (Ossett, Theakston); Black Gold (Cairngorm, CopperDragon); Black Jack (Holden's, Old Mill); Black Pearl (Milestone, Wooden Hand); Blonde Bombshell (Old Cannon, Houston); Brewers Gold (Crouch Vale, Pictish); Bullion (Old Mill, Nottingham); Challenger (Buntingford, Barum, Kingstone); Copper Ale (Hook Norton, Palmers); Crusader (Milestone, Empire); Dark (Brains, Fuzzy Duck); Dark Star (Litton, Barum); Double Hop (Cwmbran, Robinsons); Dreadnought (Chalk Hill, Nottingham); Eclipse (Blindmans, Brew Company); Endeavour (Cropton, Saffron); Equinox (Everards, Bowland, Atlas); Excelsior (Ossett, Uncle Stuart's); Fireside (Greene King, Black Country); Fruit Bat (B & T, Green Jack); Gold Rush (Harviestoun, Prospect); Gold Standard (Freeminer, Keystone); Golden Brown (Butts, Hydes); Golden Plover (Allendale, Buntingford); Golden Valley (Scattor Rock, Breconshire); Gone Fishing (Green Jack, Oulton); Green Man (Bartrams, Windsor Castle); Honey Ale (Blackfriars. Fat Cat); Honey Mild (Dark Tribe, Iceni); Honey Pot (Old Bear, Coach House); Hophead (Brewster's, Dark Star); Icarus (Blindmans, Milton); Iron Horse (Goddards, Hepworth); The Leveller (Springhead, Tydd Steam); Light Oak (Weatheroak, Mayflower); Lionheart (Hampshire, Milestone); Natterjack (Frog Island, Old Chimneys); Natural Blonde (Harviestoun, Bath Ales); Nelson's Blood (Fox, Nelson); New Model Ale (City of Cambridge, Ufford); Oblivion (Oakham, Peakstones Rock); Original Bitter (Hydes, Abbey Bells, Blackawton); Pioneer (Prospect, Mayfields); Pure Gold (Hanby, Purity); Red (Bristol Beer Factory, Hawkshead, Yetman's); Red Rock (Dark Tribe, Red Rock); Redwood (Burton Old Cottage, Grain, Weatheroak, Woodlands); Slipway (Captain Cook, Newby Wyke); Spring Ale (Burton Bridge, King, Wickwar); Speedwell Bitter (Morton, Townes); Spring Tide (Teignworthy, Blackfriars); Stag (Cairngorm, Exmoor); Star Gazer (Black Hole, Yeovil); Summer Solstice (Dark Star, Wells & Young's); Sunbeam (Battledown, Wirksworth); Sunrise (Bristol Beer Factory, Oulton); Sunset (Captain Cook, Arran); Tempest (Winter's, Atlas); Thin Ice (Sadler's, Elgood's); Top Banana (Burton Bridge, Caledonian); Trade Winds (Cairngorm, Tunnel); Trumpeter (Strathaven, Swan on the Green); Welsh Black (Bullmastiff, Heart of Wales); White Gold (White Park; White); Winter Ale (Bank's, Jennings); XB (Theakston, Batemans); XXXX (Hydes, Spectrum); Young Pretender (All Gates, Isle of Skye); Yule Fuel (Grafton, Spectrum).
This doesn't mean they taste the same (or anything like) of course. For example, here's Blackfriars Spring Tide:

and Teignworthy Spring Tide:

Local microbrewery ales are featuring on equal terms with the larger nationals in a new real ale website where you can compare flavours to see which beers taste the most similar to your preferred tipple. The system, called PintPicker, has been developed by a team of Cambridge scientists and information technologists who also happen to be beer lovers.
At the heart of the PintPicker system are six flavour attributes that allow the overall tastes of different beers to be compared. There are six primary flavours – sweet, bitter, burnt, hoppy, citrus and winey plus three secondary attributes - colour, ABV and body, and together these provide a “footprint” of the beer, its taste signature. Here's an example:

Although very simple and easy to use, a powerful “difference analysis” algorithm, working behind the scenes when you hit “similar”, returns a list of beers in order of their taste proximity to each other. So, for example, if you have a favourite beer PintPicker can tell you which other beers it knows about that are very similar to yours in flavour.
The team have conducted extensive research to determine which are the essential attributes to distinguish sufficiently between beers without making the system overcomplicated and cumbersome. They think six does the trick. And individual flavours can actually be weighted to optimize the system – so, for example, if sweet and bitter are considered the most important factors, then they can be multiplied by a number, say two, which will make them twice as important as the other attributes. In this way, the system can be tweaked “under the bonnet” until it performs optimally. But the regular beer-drinker doesn’t have to worry about that. If you can use a web browser, then you can use PintPicker.
The ethos behind PintPicker is what is known as “the wisdom of the crowd”. It relies on user input and through harnessing collective knowledge, can re-present that information back to the user community. There are a couple of key features, more philosophical than technical: firstly, there’s no such thing as right or wrong and everyone is entitled to their viewpoint – PintPicker’s strapline is “It’s a matter of taste”. Secondly, it doesn’t claim to be 100% accurate and it’s not fixed – real ale isn’t a homogeneous product like lager, so there’s bound to be some variability in the results and the system itself is flexible and dynamic and changes every time a new review is added. So don’t expect a beer that ranked as identical to another yesterday to be exactly the same today – it may not be, because this is the nature of the world of probabilities.
But what the system will do however, and with amazing consistency, is return a range of beers based on the best comparisons it makes between the ones it knows about and your chosen beer. If it returns ones that you haven’t already tried, then you have an opportunity to discover new favourites. And, intriguigingly, a beer with a different style or colour to what you expect may occasionally pop up. In any event, it’s all good fun.
Why not give it a try? It’s free and very easy to register and you can print out score cards to take with you to pub or beer festival. Log-in to add your reviews and compare real ales. And do send your comments, feedback and suggestions – we’re very keen to hear from you.

http://www.pintpicker.co.uk

http://pintpicker.blog.co.uk

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