A half-dozen Oregon-brewed IPAs landed among the top 50 in Draft Magazine's recent ranking of America's 50 best, including one in the top 10.

Released this week, the ranking was the product of nearly a month-long process, with 386 IPAs obtained from breweries throughout America and tasted blind.

Breakside Brewery was the big local winner, snagging the 26th spot for its flagship IPA and 7th for Wombat vs. Wallaby, an IPA brewed with a blend of hops from New Zealand and Australia only available at the Portland and Milwaukie brewery's Slabtown location.

Elsewhere, the list kicks off with Cast Out from Bend's Crux at No. 50, neighbor Boneyard's Hop-a-Wheelie jumps in at No. 40 and Astoria's Fort George heads home with the chill-activated Suicide Squeeze at No. 34. And Fort George wasn't done: The brewery's annual Three-Way IPA collaboration, a hazy New England-style IPA brewed this year with Portland's Great Notion and Seattle's Reuben's, was more than OK, landing at No. 11, just outside the top 10.

The list's methodology seems sound. A group of certified beer judges tasted each beer blind and gave each a 100-point score which was used to determine the ranking. Still, as writer Zach Fowle notes, with more than 5,000 breweries operating in the United States, there are at least 5,000 IPAs brewed in the country. And since many of these self-selecting breweries who took part sent in two, three, four or even five entries, it's safe to say 386 represents a tiny fraction -- 2-3 percent, perhaps -- of all available American IPAs.

Another quirk of the list: Certified Cicerones are trained to detect all sort of flavors in IPA, not just pine needles or tropical fruit. And since IPAs often have alliaceous -- onion like -- notes, Fowle & Co. have documented them. Exhaustively. Through only 50 blurbs, I count 36 times "onion," "scallion," "garlic," "chive," or "allium" is used as a flavor descriptor. The problem? While technically accurate, nobody wants to drink an IPA that tastes like "green grass and sweaty onion" (Crux's own Cast Out). This is one beer-writing trend that should be rooted out at the bulb.

-- Michael Russell