How to organise a beer tasting

It’s simple to organise a beer tasting event with a group of friends! Our guide makes the planning and preparation easy, so you can focus on the really interesting part - tasting, sampling, testing and reviewing the many beers on offer!

As well as this guide for tasting beer with a group, there are also guides for organising a beer tasting for two and a beer tasting for one.

Preparation

Beer tasting for two or more people is typically done as a blind taste test. Click here to learn more about blind and semi-blind beer tasting. If it’s not possible to conduct a blind taste test, be aware that the results may be affected by the tasters’ pre-conceptions of the beers purchased.

When selecting your beers, a random selection method has proven most effective.

It is advisable to taste no more than 20 beers in one tasting session - any more than this and the tasters’ judgement will become rather alcohol-impaired!

We recommend allowing at least 2 hours for a 20-beer tasting, with an extra 20-30 minutes at the end to review the tasters’ finding and reveal which brands of beer were tasted.

A guide to tasting beer is available for those participants to want to find out more about tasting beer before the event. You can also discover how much you really know about the art of beer appreciation by taking our fun beer quiz or perhaps review other people’s beer tasting tips and comments in the Tastebeer forum.

Printed beer scorecards greatly help to simplify the beer judging process.

This type of group beer tasting event is similar to how our own beer tasting events were conducted, so it is well worth checking out the process we followed.

Read on about Items you will need.