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Table Of Scores

X Bottle Pint

Can The Macros Do Micro?
The Big Boys Still Have Some Work To Do

Labatts and Molson are not happy sharing two per cent of the beer market with small upstart breweries like Creemore. They have designed products to compete directly with the craft brewers. Can they sell these beers on taste or do they have to rely on packaging and marketing? To find out, we held a (blind) taste off between some popular micros and some of the Big Two's look alike brands on June 17.

It was difficult to find match-ups for this tasting as the larger breweries do not take chances with new flavours, so our line-up had a slightly mainstream bias. Of the five macro brews that were tasted only Guinness came in with a respectable score although it was handily beaten by St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout which finished with the evening's best score. The only micro that scored poorly was Sleeman Honey Brown which tied Dave's Honey Brown (Molson), Creemore beat out Toronto's Own (Molson) (with an uncharacteristically low score) and Hart nearly doubled the score on Keith's IPA (Labatt).

Looks
Aroma
Flavour
Finish
Likability
Total
Rank

out of 4
out of 6
out of 22
out of 8
out of 10
out of 50

St. Ambroise Stout (5)
3.5
4.0
17.0
6.0
8.0
38.5
1

Hart (4)
2.0
4.0
15.0
5.0
6.0
32.0
2

Guinness (5)
3.0
2.0
14.0
5.0
6.0
30.0
3

Robinson's Red (1)
3.0
3.0
13.0
4.0
5.0
28.0
4

Creemore (3)
2.0
2.0
13.0
4.0
5.0
26.0
5

Toronto's Own (3)
3.0
2.0
11.0
4.0
4.0
24.0
6

Sleeman Honey Brn (2)
3.0
2.0
10.0
3.0
4.0
22.0
7

Dave's Honey Brn (2)
2.0
2.0
11.0
3.0
4.0
22.0
7

Rickard's Red (1)
3.0
2.0
11.0
3.0
3.0
22.0
7

Keith's IPA (4)
2.0
2.0
9.0
2.0
4.0
19.0
10
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