With the New Mexico Brewers Guild’s 2012 IPA Challenge in the books, we feel that it is time for a challenge of our own. The original idea of the IPA Challenge was to see which brewer had the best regular IPA on tap. Over the years, the Challenge has featured some of the state’s hoppy behemoths, beers made especially for the event instead of the regular styles.

So unlike the NMBG Challenge, we will be sampling house IPAs only (we define “house” as the beer on tap year-round, or close to year-round), no doubles, triples, or specialty IPAs. So the Challenge-winning Exodus IPA from Il Vicino will not be one of the beers competing, but rather the Wet Mountain. This challenge will still be a blind taste test and will hopefully feature some guest judges. (Interested? Get in touch with us via comments below, in person, or via our Facebook page.)

The Crew is excited for this one folks. It has been in the planning stages for months and we think (HOPE) we have a weekend set aside (Aug. 11-12) where Stoutmeister is not covering sports and E-Rock is not playing a gig out of town and (almost) everybody else is likewise work-free.

Depending on our ability to acquire the way-out-of-town IPAs whose breweries participated in the Challenge (3 Rivers, Blue Heron, High Desert, Mimbres Valley), we have not set a lineup yet. We hope to at least have the participating ABQ-metro-area breweries, plus Santa Fe’s trio, and maybe even the ABQ-area breweries that did not participate in the Guild’s event (Broken Bottle, Bad Ass, Sierra Blanca/Rio Grande).

Oh, and if anybody is out and about tonight in search of a pint, the Crew (at least three of us) will be over at Tractor around 8 p.m. to sample some of the new brews on tap. Look for a write-up on that either late tonight or tomorrow.

Cheers!

— Shilling