Fun for the whole family...

So, the last few years when my family and I have went on vacation we have had a "beer tasting" event. Now, this differs a little from those snobby wine tasting parties, and the amount of people who have partaken has never gone over 8, but I assume you could expand it quite easily.

The way we start out is we goto this local make your own six pack store in North Carolina called Chips (http://www.chipswinemarket.com/) which i highly recommend for beer and wine purchasing when in the Outer banks.

Picking the Beers

We normally buy a large selection of beer (usually every person buys a six pack), we only buy one of each due to the small amount of people partaking, but if you want to expand you would have to buy multiple of each bottle. Now as for your selection you can really do whatever you want. We normally try and get a wide variety of styles (we do focus on specific styles we know people enjoy, and avoid ones people do not enjoy), but I could also see it being very fun to maybe buy all of one type of beer and rate them to find the best Porter for example. Also, you will probably pick these depending on how serious you want to be with this, we normally don't read to much into what we are buying because we are just hanging out and having a good time and not actually trying to accomplish anything major in our decisions. Anyways that's enough on picking the beers, moving onto the actual "event"

Running the Event

The way we run our event is a very interactive social way, unlike some other versions where people write down their opinions of the beer. Basically, we put the beer in some sort of tasting order, we try to make sure the most flavorful and strong beers are at the end so they don't overpower your taste buds, and we just start drinking. After each beer, somebody rinses the glasses, and everybody eats something to clean their pallet (can be a variety of things). Then we put the bottle back on the table in the order of which we rate it (left to right, left being #1). This is fun because after every beer you can move around the order. Normally the event takes around 1.5-3 hours depending on how many people and how many beers.

Conclusion

Yeah, this isn't anything I am presenting to you as a definitive way to do this, I am just saying this is how we do it and we always have a great time. So please try and put your own spin on this and help try and perfect it. And if anything you do works really well, please post it here so we all can learn from you.