beer & wine

The wide, wide, wide world of beer drinkers

“I am special, I am special! Please, God, please, don’t let me be normal!”

— Louisa, from The Fantasticks

Beer drinkersWould you think me more special if I had tasted every particularly rare beer on the Rate Beer or Beer Advocate top howmanyever lists?

Is your palate better than mine because you appreciate the subtleties of low alcohol, lightly hopped beers and if I can’t taste a big-sized dose of Simcoe/Citra/Amarillo hops I’m bored silly?

Do you watch American Idol?

If you answered yes to any of the above I’m not quite sure why you are here. But, please, don’t leave. It’s little fun drinking alone; the point of drinking beer would be lost.

I’ve been considering this for almost two weeks, since Zak Avery posted his questioin about Elitism in Beer. To understand you should read that post and the comments, skip over to Alan’s follow up (again, the proof is in the comments), then back up to Tandleman’s Beer Blog, particularly this post (and, ahem, the comments).

Now indulge me by following one more link, this one to W. Blake Gray’s essay about “Why all wine lovers just don’t get along.”

He starts with a “study” from Constellation Brands a few years back that divided wine drinkers into six categories. The two he zeros in on are “Image Seekers” (he renames them “Quality Seekers”) and “Enthusiasts,” writing “The former spend the most money on wine; the latter expend the most verbiage on it. These are the only two who care enough about wine to read articles or blog posts about it.”

Hmmm. The others are: Overwhelmed (buy wine but don’t know anything about it); Satisfied Sippers (buy the same brand); Savvy Shoppers (look for discounts); and Traditionalists (like old wineries and are brand-loyal). I’m pretty sure that beer drinkers who would fit into similar categories can read, and I hope they do.

Anyway, I can’t resist this analogy: “And like a marriage entered into after one date, they are stuck together even though they’re incompatible, with verbal sparks flying all the time.”

To make the distinction clear he reduces it to one word (well, one word each, two in total).

Quality (or Image) Seekers want “great.”
Enthusiasts want “interesting.”

The beer-wine analogy is not perfect, but Gray says that Image Seekers (in this case I like the Constellation verbage) spend more and enthusiasts are reluctant to — in part because they understand how many great choices there are at more reasonable prices. “Quality Seekers would spend four times as much to get a wine that’s 10% better,” he writes.

Now to the nut.

What strikes me is how deaf both sides are to the other. The 100-point scale debate, for example: I’m always astounded that Enthusiasts want to take information away from Quality Seekers, and don’t even try to understand why they would want it.

Meanwhile, on the Quality Seekers side, they look at Enthusiasts the way people with jobs looked at tie-dyed student protesters. Yeah, yeah, you love the sound of your own voices. The louder you yell, the less I’m going to listen.

Go back and read the comments in the links above. You catch a bit of that sort of attitude, but you also get the sense that the participants understand (in part because they live in a relatively small country) they might some day continue their discussion in person rather than via a keyboard and computer screen.

Over a beer. So it will be civilized.

Which is what makes beer great.

The best beers of 2010 (just kidding)

I went to high school with a guy who wanted to be a sheep herder when he grew up (this was central Illinois, not Wales). He carried different varieties of wool in each pocket. He liked to pull a batch out and start telling you stories about the breed of sheep it came from. It seems like my pockets are full of bits of beer information. So here goes:

  • Think they have it figured out? Alaskan Brewing’s Smoked Porter won the gold medal (again) in the smoked beer categories in both the 2010 World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Festival. Capturing gold in the Rauchbier competition at the European Beer Star Awards definitely qualifies as a trifecta. This is the largest beer competition in Europe and judged in Germany, not far from Bamberg — the home of smoked beers.

    (As a point of order, Schlenkerla — one of two Bamberg breweries still producing its own smoked malts — does not enter these sorts of competitions.)

  • A disturbing report from Brewpublic in Portland related to the merger of the Rock Bottom and Gordon Biersch brewpub chains:

    A source associated with Rock Bottom’s brewing department, who asked to remain confidential, tells us that it now looks like things with the RB-GB merger “aren’t going the way (the most of brewers) had hoped” telling Brewpublic “We’re less than a month into this thing and the new CEO has decided to start making changes to our beer program. He wants us to standardize at least four, and possibly up to six of our beers across the entire company.”

    And:

    “We’ve never had ANY standardized beers in the history of the company.” says one Rock Bottom employee. “Most of us think (the homogenization of branding) is a terrible idea for a number of reasons, and it most likely signals the beginning of the demise of Rock Bottom to complete irrelevance in the craft brewing world – a la Gordon Biersch.”

    I wasn’t aware that Gordon Biersch is irrelevant in the craft brewing world, but this certainly merits watching.

  • Here’s how you provide context for a list (in this case the “Ten Most Interesting Wines of 2010”). I’m paraphrasing, but 1WineDude explains up front: It is NOT intended to be a “best of” or “highest rating” list; it is intended to be a list of arbitrarily-chosen wines that stood out, to him as being particularly interesting for a variety of reasons; and they are wines that he tasted in 2010.

    The thought occurred to me that if I were to write about the beers I enjoyed most in 2010 that providing a list of every beer I tasted would make it more “useful.” Let’s say I put Boulevard Brewing’s Saison Brett on the “best” list and not Orval. You might wonder, “Did Stan drink any Orval in 2010 or did he just like Saison Brett better?” But you probably wouldn’t, which is why there’ll be no “best of” post from me. Want a list? How about the list of beer books I put together last year?

  • Italy is thick with new breweries, but then in picking a dozen breweries to watch in 2011 Draft magazine also draws attention to Huntsville, Alabama, which had three open in 2010.

    Too much to keep track of? Stephen Beaumont has been busy bragging about what he found in Brazil. And we’re headed to Austin, Texas, for the holidays and it seems there are at least ten breweries recently opened, or about to open, or at least beyond the wild dreams stage.

    • The ‘perfect’ beer & Gatsby’s green light

    My favorite paragraph of the week, and I think you can connect the dots to beer:

    “Robert Parker is no dictator. He is a storyteller. The magnetism of his prose is that of J.K. Rowling’s, too: you’re first presented with a set of familiar facts and situations, and then, slowly, you’re seduced into suspending reason and believing in the perfectly impossible. Escape into a Parker review, and for a few sentences, there you are, back in junior high, the great critic’s palate—and yours, too—cured of its nagging mortality. In this counterfactual place, there is no perceptual bias, just perception. There is no confidence interval, just confidence. Parker’s 100-point wine is Gatsby’s green light, the orgiastic ghost of taste’s future, the tongue a sudden lattice of infinite resolution, the nose a sudden instrument of preternatural whiff.”

    – From Robin Goldstein’s review of Parker’s Wine Bargains: The World’s Greatest Wine Values Under $25. It might be a little wine centric for you on the whole, but the last few paragraphs are scrumptious.

    Wine and jazz? I’ll take beer and blues

    Brother Thelonious Ale from North Coast BrewingOr beer and roots music.

    Or beer and alt.country (“whatever that is,” at the late, great No Depression magazine said on its cove).

    Truth is we like wine in our family. We like all manner of jazz. Still I was surprised to see Wine and Jazz magazine today at the book store. Turns out it has been around a couple of years, and the tagline says, “Celebrating the Perfect Lifestyle Combination.”

    Right.

    At the risk of turning this beer and wine category into beer versus wine I do have to point out they feature “blogologists” rather than bloggers. Rest assured, if I ever start Craft Beer & Alt.Country magazine (the tagline would be “An existential debate with every sip or every chord”) we’ll employ bloggers.

    One final thought. Thank goodness that North Coast Brewing has staked out Thelonious Monk for all of us.