Today at I might have a glass of beer Barm writes, “Blogging about beer, I constantly find myself coming up against things I don’t know.”
Make that writing, blogging, reading, the -ing of your choice, spend several years at it and you are left with NEW BEER RULE #9: You cannot know all there is to know about beer.
So get back to your research.
I’ve always preferred the statement, ‘One is not as smart as they think they are.’ That covers everything. I use that a lot in any talk I give. 🙂 Repeat after me, ‘I am not as smart as I think I am.’
Still doesn’t stop most people thought. ‘Argumentum ad nauseam, Argumentum ad infinitum’. 🙂
I love Rule 9!
Amen brother! Some people definitely think they know everything, or at least pretend to. Drives me nuts!
-Lost
I just love to learn. Period.
The world has so much untrodden ground that I find it absolutely exciting!
The world is not static. Learn and adapt or die.
Embrace change as you age and you’ll never get old.
Rule #9 for life! Time for that research now.
Love it. For as much as I tell people I love telling about homebrewing at my day job, some of my favorite moments are when I say “I don’t know” and try to understand the how or why of something. The learning is the best part still.
Thanks to beer writer John Foyston, writing about hop pelletization in yesterday’s Oregonian, I learned that the process can heat hops to 140 degrees. Later, an anonymous poster said that while that used to be true, many plants have now managed to get the temperature down closer to 110–like the place John was writing about.
In all those debates about whole hops versus pellets, I never heard that pellets went up to 140–no doubt that was changing the hops’ chemistry. But apparently, it’s not such an issue any more.
And you’re right Stan, if you put a lot of personal stake in being the most knowledgeable, you find yourself embarrassed a lot of the time.
This rule is only for brewers – professional or hobby. As a beer consumer, all I need to know about the beer is what sits in the glass. Beer is a tasting experience. It is not a science nor a history. Does knowing more about a beer contribute to its enjoyment? It never has for me and people who think it does don’t understand that beer is only a beverage and not a riddle.
I certainly do find that knowing why a beer tastes toffeeish, or bitter, or grapefruity, contributes to my enjoyment of it. Sometimes it also helps me decide that a particular beer is not worth finishing. Ignorance is not bliss.
And is your enjoyment of a dish at a restaurant also diminished if you don’t know how it was made?
This is not a question of ignorance, this is a question of relevance. Can one enjoy beer without knowing anything about it? I submit the answer is a resounding yes. And does knowing something about a beer diminish one’s enjoyment? No, I don’t believe so, though I was somewhat confused by your second sentence.
Although not completely on-topic, I highly recommend this blog entry:
http://bit.ly/av6x63
If I can’t recognise what’s in the dish, it probably would lessen my enjoyment.
If you can’t recognise what’s in the dish, you could probably find a better place to eat. However, I enjoy surprises. If I come upon a new dish or beer, my instinct is not to find out how it was made, but to find out if there is more (assuming I liked it, of course).
Beer, like food, is a sensory experience and intellectualising it, for me, detracts from the enjoyment.
Mike – I see your point, but I think there is room between learning that results from curiosity and and intellectualising (or intellectualizing). Put another way, it is not either/or.
Stan, I see the beer world in three groups: 1. hundreds of millions who just drink beer, mostly what you and I would consider not worth drinking, 2. a few thousand brewers, professional and hobby, and finally, 3. a few thousand beer tickers/geeks who don’t care about beer, but about collecting. What the excellent blogger Sid Boggle described from his own experience as a ticker: “However, after a year or so, I noticed that I was becoming less interested in the experience of beer, than the thrill of trying to track down the latest new release, or high-scoring tradeable bottle.” (I posted the link to this entry above.)
As I already said, learning about beer is relevant to the second group (brewers), but not to the first group (in general). For the third group (tickers/geeks), knowledge about beer is what Sid described as “I realised that there was an unsavoury, dick-waving aspect to these communities. The awarding of points or karma for the beers you rated, no matter how coherent your review, established ticker hierarchies and distorted perceptions of how knowledgeable a member might be.”
Just as, when I hear a lovely new song, I prefer to let the singer and musicians tell me the story, when I drink a new beer, I prefer the brewer to tell me the story of his/her beer through the act of drinking it. My point is solely that this “rule” has very limited application to the vast majority of beer drinkers. It is not that it has no validity.