We're at Rising Tide Brewing Company.
We're going to do the drawing for the second annual Maine Madness beer tournament.
Last year Rising Tide's Maine Island Trail L came in first place, beating Allagash's
Curio.
So we're going to go in there and we're going to have people pull the match up.
So we're going to do it randomly.
We have 64 beers selected and we're really excited.
So come on in.
I'm Dave Patterson, a co-founder of the Maine Madness beer tournament.
I'm also a beer columnist at Maine today and I'm with Tim Eversold.
I helped Dave do his beer stuff.
So this is the final selection.
We just chose these inside.
We had people inside Rising Tide who just randomly picked these out of a bucket.
So let's go through.
We're just going to go through each section and talk about what we like, what we think
the big matchups are.
So Tim, what do you think of this section of the bracket?
The most interesting part about this side right here is that we have last year's winner,
Maine Island Trail Ale, go up against in an early round against the runner up of last
year's in the curio plus dinner, which is the most sought after beer in the whole tournament
and the whole state in the world right now, all happening in this upper section of this
bracket.
So I think it's going to be a very, very tough out for some of these beers right here.
Well, this one, I mean, you have Resergam, you know, which is definitely different.
It's, you know, wild, wild east beer and it just won silver at the Great American Brewers
Festival in Denver, Colorado.
And so this one, I think he's going to do really well, it's going up against angels
with filthy souls.
I mean, that's going to be a really heavy hitter up, you know, peeper.
And then you have this great matchup, which I love, which is Pumpkin Head, which I believe
is, Pumpkin Head is, I believe the best selling beer in Maine and then up against the substance,
which, you know, was just in men's journals, 60 best beers in the world.
So this is critically acclaimed and this one is critically acclaimed and making, made
a lot of money over the years, so it's a really good matchup.
Tim, what do you think of this side?
One of the most interesting things as a hop, hop head myself, I'm interested in the Moe,
Maine beer company Moe versus the Tobago Hop Swap.
I love both of those beers.
It's a bummer they have to face each other in the first round, but that's the brakes,
you know, you're drawing randomly out of a hat.
But I think, you know, it's going to be interesting.
There's a lot of good, I mean, there's a lot of good beers all over here.
That's the whole point, right?
Yeah.
So we'll see what happens there, about the bottom here, Dave.
I think the bottom is interesting here because you have epiphanies to do on the scene and
it is, it's a brilliant beer.
I don't know how many people have tried it, so I don't know if it could, you know, lose
out earlier.
The substance didn't go far last year because last year it was trying to mean they had just
come out and it didn't make it very far.
Not a lot of people knew about it.
So I think epiphanies, if you wanted those next year, would be a big contender.
But you know, you have Seafelts, this is really interesting, you have Seafelts, this feature
on MTR earlier this year.
The biggest point of this and what we want to do more than anything, more than this being
a competition, if it is a competition, we all win.
The drinkers win.
There's so much great beer to drink in Maine and this is, what we want to encourage people
to do is try a beer on the year you haven't had before.
This is not really, we have our favorites, but you know, what's this saying in the matters
of taste, there can be no, there can be no argument.
You can't argue with what someone likes.
So go out, try something new and just celebrate this great beer lane landscape we live in.
Cheers.
