Comments on: New Beer Rule #3: 2 pints are better than one

By: Ilya Feynberg

Ilya Feynberg — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:06:39 +0000

How someone can say no to a second pint…is totally beyond me. BUT despite the “funny” part of this rule, there really is some serious stuff here to merit it.

As Leigh mentioned, I’ve passed one too many judgments on a beer on the first try. Sometimes it takes more than one try, and a change of environment.

As for the rest of the debate here (and yes I’m well aware of how late I am to it), I think we’re missing the big picture here of the craft beer and even fine wine cultures. People that put so much freakin’ rating on…well…ratings and points is getting really bothersome to me. It’s not what this is all about here ladies and gents.

Ilya

By: leigh

leigh — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 14:15:18 +0000

I like this rule a lot – i’ve often passed bad judgement on the first pint/taste. it would avoid egg on the face, thats for sure. but the previous point is valid – its easier to pass good judgement on the second – i personally would’nt try a beer twice if it didnt set my world on fire the first time round! Excellent post.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 20:42:40 +0000

Since I’m also big into wine, I’ll try to draw a comparison with the wine world: the maligned phenomenon of the “Parker wine” or the “tasting wine”…those bottles that are solely designed around the idea of standing out in a peer-group tasting. Which means that, if you are producing a Napa cabernet, it is going to have to be one butt-whupping, illogically extracted, oaky-enough-to-deliver-legitimate-tongue-splinters bad boy of a 15% wine. And that’s all well and good in a tasting. But they are not the bottles you reach for when you are having a dinner party, because they are meant to stand on their own. Or stand out on their own, not to share the table with your best effort at tomato sauce-braised pork shoulder. And they are not the bottles you go back to buy full cases of. I suppose the analogue in the beer world would be the 10+% 100+ IBU flavor freight trains that are so much the topic conversation these last few months.
The problem for me is when I sit down with one of these Barry Bonds/Floyd Landis bottles and try to eat a pot roast with it, the beverage just doesn’t make sense. Even when I do tastings (and I usually taste in peer group flights, not in single beers, and at least 6 ounces per pour), some beers that really wake me up at first taste really start to be a drag by the time I get around to ounce five or six.
Practical example bound to create controversy: Avery Hog Heaven. First sip: absolutely staggering. I was blown away. It is so intense, so full of everything. Second sip: wow. What a beer, truly great. Third, fourth, fifth. Sixth sip: Good god, beer, stop yelling at me. Eight ounces was more than enough for this guy.
Another practical example, also somewhat designed to stir controversy: Chimay Cinq Cents/White. This is the beer that drew me into drinking Belgian beer (Hey, at 2.70 per pour on tap at the local Belgian bar in Madrid, who wouldn’t indulge?). It’s one of those beers that doesn’t jump up and slap me in the face (I believe my comment upon first sip was, “Ooh. That’s good,” and then my wife and I talked about the meaning of life or something), but it is a bottle that I continue to go back to. Despite all the crap Chimay gets about verve being sacrificed for volume, I still find this a tasty, enjoyable, and friendly beer that I will always go back to.
I will passionately defend Chimay not because I think it’s great beer, but because it draws me back to it (as does Westmalle, as does Drei Fonteinen, as does RR Temptation, as did Heavywieght Biere d’Arte, God rest its glorious merry soul, and so on), whereas I will dismiss Hog Heaven–which, one could argue, is a better brew–ambivalently, because the tasting experience was enough. I am not drawn back for more, impressed as I was.
To get back to Barry and Floyd, and then to wrap up. I want to believe in those guys. I want to believe that what they have done is legit (Did any of you see that ride in stage 17 of the Tour? I was in hog heaven when Floyd attacked!). But the urge to be bigger and better is tainting their reputations and the sports around them. Too, I’m tired hearing abour Barry. I’m tired of hearing about Floyd. But I’m still a Bobby Julich fan, even though he doesn’t win races. I’m always drawn back to watch him. I’m a Chase Utley fan, even though the Phillies themselves are dismal. I’m drawn back to watch him.
I would say that, if you are not drawn back to a beer for a second, third, fourth pint (over whatever time period you want to impose), perhaps judgement shouldn’t be published.

By: Stan Hieronymus

Stan Hieronymus — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 20:27:24 +0000

Kev – I think you are getting to one of the strengths of the beer communities.

Whether its BA or Rate Beer (or even Real Beer, where you don’t get numbers) there are people you get to know. The ratings become a form of conversation.

It is not as good as being able to drink and chat about beer with friends, but it beats waiting weeks or months for a brewspaper or magazine to provide some sort of panel presentation.

I guess I should confess (the right word?) that I drink beer in smaller amounts than a serving. I get together with friends and we all bring beers that are usually new to us. Often ones you can’t get in New Mexico.

We talk about the beers, related beers, ingredients, all the basic geek topics. We also accidentally talk about non-beer things on occasion.

If I have a beer I particularly like I would not try to describe it based on that experience, but it could end up being one of the sets of circumstances Mr. B. alludes to.

I’d be seeking out that beer, quite likely while traveling, and trying it again. Not with the idea of writing about it, but because I want to drink it. That’s how it went with Chouffe Houblon Dobbelen IPA Tripel. I have no urge to put a number to the beer, but I do know I’ll buy it (and as many bottles as I can haul home) when I see it.

By: KevBrews

KevBrews — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:48:57 +0000

Alan,
Doesn’t this go back to an issue Stan wrote about a couple of weeks ago–finding reviewers that you trust?

When I check the BA ratings for a beer, I never read all of the ratings. Usually, I sort by the highest ratings and read the first 3-5; then by the lowest ratings (again, reading the first 3-5). Then I check what the top reviewers have to say (usually the same folks time and time again). There is usually a common thread at the high end and a similar thread at the low end, so I can get an average sense of what folks like or dislike about a given beer.

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:03:55 +0000

Well (and perhaps to mirror what Hugh Grant did with a similar amount of beans this week) the effect is compounded the more often a beer is rated. I may take a look or two at the actual sensory notes of a reviewer now and then but if there are 300 reviews, I am hardly going to read the 175 of them that rate the beer between 4.357 and 4.124. Maybe they need a more detailed statistical analysis so that I can learn that 87 reviews wrote orangy and another 93 said tangerine...but what does even that get me?

By: Steve Beaumont

Steve Beaumont — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:38:46 +0000

Ah, KevBrews hits on an interesting point, which is to say, or ask, what are the ratings/tasting notes meant to accomplish? Should he not rate a beer based on a single serving? Hell, who am I to say yea or nay? If he’s putting together notes for his own personal satisfaction, and meaning only to share them with his peers through a ratings website, then by all means, make them on the basis of 1/4 ounce for all I care.

But, if such notes are meant to carry evaluatory weight, as the proprietors of certain beer ratings sites appear to be suggesting, then the review crafted as above is unfair to one and all, from the rater to the reader to the brewer and retailer. He and everybody else can note that “this review is based on one taste of half a 12 ounce bottle, shared with TopRaterGuy,” but when his score is merged in with other evaluations, that caveat ceases to have any relevance.

In other words, perhaps the issue here is less the method than the intent.

(That sound you hear is a family-sized can of beans being wrenched open.)

By: KevBrews

KevBrews — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:17:20 +0000

I couldn’t agree more with your approach, although I think the point Stephen made is particularly important–not only should you try more than one serving of a beer–you need to try it on a couple of different occasions.

However, a lot of us get single servings of a rare beer in a trade–does that mean we shouldn’t rate them? Probably not, but it does put us under some sort of obligation to note that, doesn’t it?

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:16:43 +0000

Good point. In my writing – which is we all agree as poetic (yet rambling) as any out there – it is about my own long term relationship with beer. There are continued referrals back to the best of what I have experienced to build up a single body of the report on my experience. As a result, I am not likely going to have two oz and declare that the New Jerusalem has now been founded upon earth (…I have never even been to the Jerusalem Tavern let alone any new ones.) I don’t really do blind testings and I do not purport to rate, score or rank. I only compare against my personal high water marks to date.

So just as I might warn (as any good minor generally and rightly disregarded prophe might do from time to time) about the issues of gurusim and snobism as impediments to gleaning the wisdom of others about beer, then maybe I take your point to mean that the massed and massing of ratings of other are equally perilous as they are or become statistical in nature, prone to oath bolstering and can be based on a pretty fleeting relationship in the drive to increase the number of beers one can claim to have sipped. Excellent – I am collecting hobby-horses.

By: Stan Hieronymus

Stan Hieronymus — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:28:56 +0000

Alan, my post was godawful long to begin with – hurting its clarity – so I didn’t include the caveat we start by discarding flawed beers. You should do that.

To your book analogy. Would you read the first chapter of a book, quit there and declare it one of the best books you ever read?

That’s what people rating beer based on two ounces are doing.

And I don’t think it is fair to require a beer to open with a triumphant blast. I had a 7.5% abv imperial stout a while back that was great. It’s going to struggle in blind tastings because it’s not as intense at the start as something like Siberian Night. But without alcohol to mask the underlying flavors those flavors were allowed to emerge. Fortunately they didn’t suck.