Larry Koestler

photo c/o http://www.thefullpint.com

As something of a follow-up to my “The Top-Rated Beer Advocate Beers by State” blog post from last July, and because I find the beer ranking process simultaneously fascinating and vexing (my reaction toward a given beer seems to mostly line up with those that take the time to write lengthy reviews on Beer Advocate; though there are some instances where I find them to be way off) — not to mention the fact that, like many a beer obsessive, I enjoy tracking down beers I can’t regularly obtain and crossing so-called whales off my proverbial list — I decided to cull BA’s freely available data and create three separate spreadsheets detailing what the highest-rated American Double/Imperial IPAs, American IPAs and American Pale Ales (APAs) for every state in the country. Why these styles? Because they’re the three I gravitate toward most frequently. In this second part we’ll look at American IPAs.

For Part 1 on American Double/Imperial IPAs, click here.

To help limit some of the heft of this project, I decided on arbitrary cutoffs for each category — DIPAs had to have a minimum of 15 reviews; IPAs a minimum of 25; and APAs a minimum of 20, giving us overall data sets of 432, 602 and 454, respectively. Bear in mind that BA’s data is ever-evolving, and it’s very likely that by the time you read this certain beers that may be “missing” (for example, I was surprised that Peekskill Brewery’s delicious Shotgun Willy IPA didn’t show up anywhere in New York State’s Top IPAs, as it’s 4.24 rAvg would have made it the second-highest-rated IPA in the state behind Ithaca’s Flower Power IPA, but only seven people have reviewed it thus far. Assuming continued favorable reviews, it seems likely that it will take its rightful place as one of the best-regarded IPAs in the state in due time. Fun fact: Peekskill’s brewmaster is Jeff O’Neill, formerly of Ithaca) will have received enough reviews to push them over my arbitrary thresholds, and so at some point it may make sense to return to this project and reassess — consider this more of a snapshot of what’s going on at this exact moment. Another caveat is the fact that all of the ratings (rAvg) are unweighted, which is why the data I have doesn’t line up exactly with Beer Advocate’s properly weighted “Top Beers’” lists. And also keep in mind that not every state will necessarily be represented in these lists, and that certain states (cough cough California cough) will be substantially better represented than others.

And with that out of the way, here are the top-rated (unweighted, minimum 25 reviews) American IPAs by state: