Before you ask, no, we did not drink every beer produced by a North Texas brewery. The goal was to drink as many non-seasonal local beers as we could, to try to find a good cross section of North Texas breweries and styles. We added a few of our own to LUCK’s meticulously curated local-beer selection, bringing the number of beers tasted in one afternoon to 31. (We’ve ranked 30 because we accidentally drank one seasonal, which would’ve finished in the bottom five anyway.)

FOR LOCAL BEER NEWBIES, IF YOU LIKE … Fat Tire

try Rahr’s Buffalo Butt Coors Light

try Rabbit Hole’s Mike Modano’s 561 Samuel Adams Boston Lager

try Lakewood’s Lakewood Lager Newcastle Brown Ale

try Grapevine’s Sir William’s Blue Moon

try Revolver’s Blood and Honey

The beers were tasted on a Wednesday afternoon at LUCK, in Trinity Groves, and were served in four-sample flights, arranged—loosely—by style.

Is this an exhaustive list of every North Texas beer? No. Are you liable to get angry that Lakewood’s The Temptress milk stout ranked surprisingly low or that the top beer is one you’ve likely never tasted? Yes.

D Magazine’s Tim Rogers, Matthew Shelley, and I participated in the tasting, but our scores were not taken into account for the ranking. The judges were given a separate Beer Judge Certification Program scoresheet for each beer, and asked to comment on the following: aroma, appearance, flavor, mouthfeel, and overall impression. (We’ve included a sampling of their comments.) The beers were then scored, with the highest possible total being 50 points.

The panel:

—Máté Hartai, bartender and certified cicerone, the Libertine Bar

—Melissa Monosoff, master sommelier, certified cicerone, and Culinary Institute of America graduate

—Dan Padgett, bartender, Meddlesome Moth

—Josh Yingling, owner, Goodfriend Beer Garden & Burger House and Blind Butcher

If you have an issue with the scoring, please find any of the above four professionals at their places of business.

Other terms you’ll want to know for the chart below: ABV is a measure of the percentage of alcohol by volume. IBU is a measure of the bitterness of the beer on the International Bittering Units scale. Here is an explanation of how it’s measured, but you really just need to know that the higher the number, the bitterer the beer.