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Rahr tops Zymurgy readers survey: a follow-up
See the post below for the background on Ft. Worth’s Rahr & Sons slaughtering the competition in Zymurgy magazine’s poll for best beers available in America. The news lit up the blogosphere Wednesday. Per my request for comment, Zymurgy editor Jill Redding, who also wrote the piece, sent this along. My questions are in italics:
Was this an e-mail survey?
Yes, this was an email survey. We asked Zymurgy readers (in the magazine, on TechTalk and on the AHA Forum) to submit a list of their 20 favorite beers, via email. It can be any beer that is commercially available in the United States. This is the 8th year of the Best Beers survey (started by Ray Daniels in 2003) and we’ve always done it that way. However, in 2011 we will be doing online voting. We had already made that decision before the 2010 poll was published.
Are you aware of any organized campaign by Rahr or its fans to get out the vote?
I am not aware of any organized campaign and do not want to speculate about it. Rahr consistently does well in the poll (they finished in the top 20 in 2009) so their fans are aware of the poll in some capacity.
Barring the possibility of that, are you aware of receiving a greater-than-expected number of votes from readers in Texas, specifically North Texas?
Readers were asked to submit their city and state along with their votes. Some did, some didn’t. I didn’t keep track of every city and state. Yes, there were a lot of votes from Texas, but also a lot of votes from other states. I did go through and see how many states were represented, and there were 30 states represented in the poll as far as I could tell from those who did submit that information.
Did any other Texas breweries come close to cracking the top 50?
Yes, Saint Arnold in Houston consistently does well in the poll, and they were definitely in the top 50 (the poll only lists the top 25 breweries).
In previous years, has there ever been anything close to this “landslide?”
As I mentioned, Ray Daniels started the poll when he was Zymurgy editor in 2003. I took over the poll when I became editor-in-chief in 2006. I think this is the largest margin of victory in the brewery rankings from when I took over the poll. I don’t have Ray’s notes from previous polls so I don’t know the exact numbers.
There’s mention of the not quite 1,200 votes being a record. What’s the previous record?
We actually received 2,867 votes this year (for 1,192 different beers). The previous record was 2,612 votes for 1,034 different beers in 2009. The poll has been getting bigger every year. We are anticipating a significantly larger turnout in 2011 with the convenience of online voting.
Jamie Brunner, Rahr’s creative director, also responded to a request for comment essentially chalking the win up to the brewery’s vast and zealous supporters, some of whom helped keep the place alive working as volunteers a few years back. When you’ve manned the bottling line for a brewery you love, pushing “send” on a computer keyboard probably doesn’t seem like all that much work. He says, in part:
“The best thing we can do is show you - in person - our supporters. We would like to invite you to the brewery when we reopen (please don’t ask me for an exact date because I’ve become a jinx to the brewery when it comes to opening dates - but we’re expecting it to happen in the next couple of weeks)…We have a lot of love and support for our fellow Texas breweries and we feel with each award or each piece of recognition given to one of us the state as a whole - and all the breweries in it - benefit. We would like to think we’re doing our part to make Texans proud.”
air enough, and I appreciate the invitation and hope to take them up on it soon enough. But still the thought remains that some of Rahr’s well-meaning but crazy overzealous supporters, by so overwhelming stuff the ballot box with votes for — so far as I can tell — every single one of the brewery’s beers, they’ve done a disservice to Zymurgy and set up their beloved brewery to disappoint the elevated expectations of beer drinkers across the fruited plain when and if they get their hands on any Rahr product. Nobody is that good.
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