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Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Cloudy beer, flat beer

The head on a particularly lively Belgian beer.

CLOUDY

We continue to watch with interest, if not burning enthusiasm, the emergence of unfined beer in the UK, accompanied by a discussion about British drinkers’ willingness to accept haziness.

We were reminded by a distinctly soupy pint of St Austell Tribute in a pub the other day that there is a distinction between ‘wholesome’ haze intended by the brewer and the kind of cloudiness, presented without apology, that ought to ring alarm bells — a sure sign of a careless publican.

People might come to accept hazy beer but how can they tell good haze from bad cloudiness? That’s a whole other level of consumer education.

FLAT

At a pub beer festival recently we were served a pint that, by the time we’d sat down, was completely flat. We drank it anyway and, you know what? It tasted fine. We’re big fans of a head on our beer but this did set us wondering: why?

We don’t expect a head on other beverages like wine or scrumpy cider, and a mirror-like surface is almost a mark of quality in a well-aged barley wine or Belgian lambic beer.

After the recent mania for unfined beer, how long before someone markets a deliberately flat one? The accidentally flat beer we drank tasted sweeter and more cloying than it would have done with some condition but that’s nothing for which a brewer couldn’t compensate in formulating the recipe.

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Generalisations about beer culture opinion

The Corrections

Boak: This has a really nice malt flavour — that grainy, chewy breadiness

Nearby Bloke: Err… correction! It’s obvious this is made from only pale malt which contributes exactly zero flavour to a beer.

Boak: Well, I’m thinking of the malt flavour you might get in a good lager like–

Nearby Bloke: That’s hops! If there’s flavour in a pale beer, it’s hops. (Face reddening) PALE MALT DOESN’T ADD FLAVOUR!

Boak: (Realising she can’t win, hoping he’ll go away) Uh-huh.

Nearby Bloke: (Sensing that he’s being humoured) No, seriously, and I should know. I’m a beer expert myself.

We sometimes move in geeky circles, it can’t be denied, and we geeks occasionally struggle with some elements of human interaction. Aggressively correcting people is one of the worst habits of the hardened geek.

Nearby Bloke could have started the above conversation with: “Excuse me, I was interested in what you were saying there, because I’ve always understood that pale malt contributes little flavour to a beer….”

Even if you are one hundred per cent sure you’re right, what is to be gained from entering a conversation with a bullish cry of WRONG! and a hectoring tone? It leaves you nowhere to go but redder, shriller and weirder.

PS. Another bad habit of geeks: referring to large groups of people as ‘sheep’ or ‘idiots’.

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Belgium Generalisations about beer culture

How Can Belgian Beer be so Cheap?

The price of Belgian beer gets tossed into arguments on pricing like a Trappist-made hand grenade: how can newer craft breweries charge so much for their product when a classic, ‘world class’ beer like Saison Dupont can be bought for £1.80 a bottle?

Even in bars with leatherbound beer lists, Trappist beers like Westmalle Triple can be bought for several pounds less than beers of equivalent strength from hipper breweries. We have, in fact, found ourselves choosing Belgian beer in British bars to save a couple of quid.

Are monks less ruthlessly capitalistic than some other producers, as Jeff ‘Beervana’ Alworth suggests here?

From reading Stan Hieronymus’s BLAM! our suspicion is that it’s actually to do with the efficiency of longstanding brewing operations. Kinks have been ironed out, fermenting/conditioning times optimised (without compromise), and quality control processes perfected. They are also not shy with the cane sugar (15%-20% of some brews’ fermentables) and hop extract.

But is there more to it? And will their prices eventually creep up?

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Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Are We Being ‘Had’?

The price of beer — the subject that won’t go away — flared up again this week. Two sides of the argument were expressed eloquently by Phil (are we’re being swindled?) and Grace (don’t judge me for paying £4 a half), prompting the following thoughts.

On the one hand…
1. There’s nothing wrong with questioning the price of a product.
2. There’s nothing wrong with questioning who, if anyone, is bumping up the price and how.
3. There’s certainly nothing wrong with refusing to buy a product or service because you think it’s overpriced.

But, on the other…
4. How people choose to spend their money is their business.
5. Market economics apply to beer: if it’s actually overpriced, i.e. priced beyond what people are willing to pay, it won’t sell. (But Brewdog’s bars, the Euston Tap, and the Craft Beer Co., et al, do seem to be busy…)
6. In a bar or pub, your money doesn’t buy a volume of liquid: it buys staff training, ambience, glassware, music licenses… do you think those are good value?
7. In the specific case of Brewdog, your money is probably also paying for the rapid expansion of their bar chain across the UK. Some people might consider that a subsidy worth paying; others will feel horrified.

Yesterday, we had a strong urge to go for a ‘posh beer’, just like we occasionally want a ‘posh meal’. Those occasional posh  beers are part of a mixed diet of homebrew (practically free), supermarket beer (cheap) and cask ale in the pub (£2.60-3.40 a pint, generally). We were conscious of the price — £6.75 for a bottle of Great Divide Yeti, for example, did cause us to raise our eyebrows — but made an informed decision to indulge ourselves. The price was on prominent display, we were under no pressure, and there was a ‘cheap’ option — lager at £3 a pint.

We’re also conscious that the Hand Bar in Falmouth is out on a limb, selling this type of beer further west than anyone else, in a market otherwise dominated by Skinner’s, St Austell and Sharp’s. We don’t get the impression the owner of the bar is getting rich off this; we wonder if he’s even making a living.

So, in conclusion, we don’t think we were being had — we were choosing to take part in a transaction, with our eyes open.

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Generalisations about beer culture marketing The Session

Session #63 — the Beer Moment

A busy pub.

This month’s Session is hosted by Pete Brown.

‘The beer moment’ is a key idea in a lot of beer marketing: if you can’t sell the liquid in the glass, and are no longer allowed to imply that beer is good for you, or makes you more attractive, you can at least sell the camaraderie that it brings.

German TV ads for beer merge into one blurred composite in our minds: “good friends, good times, good beer”; chisel-jawed men in expensive shirts laughing as they raise delicate glasses of creamy-headed pilsner to their lips; golden liquid erupting in showers across the screen as something that sounds like the Top Gun anthem begins to play…

But that fakery doesn’t mean ‘the moment’ doesn’t exist. In reality, it might be quiet — a newspaper in the pub at lunchtime on a midweek day off — or messy — one beer too many with friends, speaking your mind and laughing too loudly, sheltered together from the storm. (Quite a few of our ‘memorable beers‘ posts from last month were really about time and place.)

One thing is certain: in Britain, ‘Do you fancy a pint?’ means a whole lot more than ‘Would you like to consume a specific volume of liquid?’.