Month: March 2008

Monday morning musing: What makes a great beer?

The Ann Arbor News does a quick Q&A with Ron Jeffries of Jolly Pumpkin Ales: Serving humanity via better beer. Give Ron an opportunity to wax philosophic and he will.

Consider the last question: What makes a great beer?

That is a question that is impossible to answer because its entirely subjective. A really great beer is going to be different for every individual, and not only every individual, but every moment of your day and every day of your life because there are so many different flavors out there within different beers that go with so many different foods or different weather. There’s no answer to that question.

Nice answer.

Also got me wondering if flipping two words makes it a different question: What makes a beer great?

Too subtle? Perhaps. It could be the setting, a different sort of “moment” than Ron refers to, the pour, when the cask was broached, whatever.

All reasons that sometimes you drink a good-excellent-just fair beer and think “great,” and sometimes you pour a “great” beer and it isn’t.

100 IBU beers got nothing on these guys

Hot hot chile sauce

Shocktop WheatYep, one of the reasons we moved to New Mexico was because we love the hot food.

For us the annual Fiery Foods Festival in Albuquerque, which wrapped up today, is as exciting as the Oregon Brewers Festival.

I did come across a beer story today, which I’ll post Tuesday, beyond the obvious — that the specialty beers Anheuser-Busch is distributing, such as its own Shock Top Belgian Top (pictured), Redhook and Widmer, Hoegaarden and Leffe Blond, are the ones the distributor is bringing for drinkers to sample and to buy. Much higher profile than a few years ago.

But there’s also a chile pepper/hops analogy that’s been obvious since our first visit to Fiery Foods in 1994.

You’ve got a set of vendors selling insane products. Sunday that would be sauces so hot they’d burn away several layers of taste buds, leaving you in pain and unable to taste anything for days. At a beer festival that would be beers with crazy amount of hops.

You’ve got another set who totally avoid excess, and can be seen wagging their fingers.

Then there are the folks who talk about flavor and heat. Or flavor and bitterness. Bless ’em.

So soon, Stone beers and hot sauces. In the same bottle. Be here.