The World Cup of Beer is a knockout tournament where bottled beers go head to head and are judged on taste and aesthetics.

The Knockout Stage

· Participants are assigned a quarter-final and again score the beers on taste and aesthetics.
· The beer with the highest score progresses to the semi-finals.
· If there are more participants than quarter-finals two or more participants rate the beers and combine their scores to determine which beer progresses to the semi-finals.
· Do the same thing for the semi-finals.
· In the final everyone drinks the two finalists. The scores from all the participants are tallied and the finalist with the highest score is crowned the World Champion of Beer.

Scoring Categories:

Each beer is scored out of a possible 50 points. Each of the scoring categories is weighted depending on its importance - for instance Taste is worth 15 points while Heft is worth only two points. An explanation of each of the scoring categories:

· Taste (15 points) Is it delicious?
· Polish (9 points) How smooth is the after taste?
· Swiggability (6 points) Is it easy to swig or did it just dribble down your t-shirt?
· Label (10 points) How attractive is the label? Does it fit well with the bottle? Is it crap?
· Bottle Shape (5 points) Too big, too small, too wide, too brown?
· Heft (2 points) Heavy like Grolsch or light like Pacifico?
· Intimidation Factor (3 points) How threatening is the beer? Skullsplitter vs. Corona.

Amount of drinking involved:

Four or more people - 10 beers each
Two people - 16 beers each
One person over a few nights (or one sloppy, urine stained derelict over a few hours) - 30 beers

To make things easy print off the Score Sheet and Tournament Sheet. It's recommended that the person with the highest tolerance manage the Tournament sheet.

Enjoy!

Held a successful World Cup of Beer? Want to share the results? Send an email and pictures to the editor@karmicfootball.com