Category Archives: Generalisations about beer culture

The ‘golden ears’ problem

Cables - The Missing Link - Desktop Audio Upgrade Part 2
Phil made a good point in a comment at Zak Avery’s blog: it’s fine to admit that some people know more about some things than some other people. When we need to buy new gadgets or computers, we ring Bailey’s brother; when we want help with our German, we ask Boak’s mum; and, bless them, when our friends want advice about beer, they ask us. In those conversations, no-one is ‘lording it’ over anyone else. (We hope.)

Having said that, we’ve been on the receiving end of advice like this more than once: “If you’re not going to buy a system with separate components, you might as well listen to your music on a transistor radio. And you can’t sit your speakers flat on that shelf — you need spikes. It’s going to cost you several thousand pounds, or it’s not worth bothering at all. I can’t bear to listen to music on your current setup, actually — can’t you hear that digital distortion? Can’t you hear it? There! Listen! Argh!” &c..

Our sincere response? “It sounds fine to us.” We end up with a £120 all-in-one stereo from Curry’s and we’re perfectly happy with it.

Maybe some people simply can’t taste the difference between good and bad beer, however often they try? If that’s the case, it doesn’t make them idiots — it makes them lucky.

Our suspicion? We probably could learn to appreciate high-end audio if we really wanted to, but we don’t: it’s an expensive habit…

Picture by Jordanhill School, from Flickr Creative Commons.

 

Are attempts to innovate futile?

Detail from the cover of Switched on Bach by Wendy Carlos.

We have a conservative streak when it comes to beer and, these days, find ourselves drawn to weaker, more straightforward beers most of the time. We like the idea of preserving our brewing heritage and believe that there are still pleasing but subtle variations to be found in less showy tinkering with hops, malt, water and yeast.

We can’t, in all honesty, say we’ve loved many self-declared innovative beers — nothing barrel-aged, for example, has made our list of favourites; our mouths do now not water at the idea of an Islay lambic; and we’re nonplussed by the very idea of black IPA.

We also roll our eyes at brewers who describe themselves as innovative and then… aren’t. They’re like pop groups who say their sound ‘defies categorisation’ while producing middle-of-the-road indie music.

Having said all of that, we’re delighted that there are people still trying genuinely to innovate, even if the results aren’t always instant classics, and we do believe there are new flavours to be shaken out through experimentation. Garlic brownies, thriller-action wildlife documentaries and heavy metal baroque virginals all sound like worthwhile experiments to us, though we wouldn’t want a diet of nothing but.

The only way to break new ground is through failed experiments and doing things that most people won’t like.

Various posts and comments this week have led us to pondering this subject. Here’s Zak Avery on ‘wacky’ beers as part of a balanced diet; Velky Al at Fuggled on his preference for beer that tastes of beer with an interesting comment from Ron Pattinson; and Knut Albert on two beers he thinks prove the point that there are new things to be discovered.

Fashionable hops

Hops

  1. One of our friends: “So what exactly are hops? Are they the thing that makes up the main body of the beer? Are they a cereal or something?”
  2. Mark ‘Bottled Beer Year’ Dexter on beer labelling: “Hop varieties listed as an enhancement are great. But on their own – they leave too many clueless.”
  3. Another friend drinking our Citra pale ale: “What’s Citra? Is that a type of beer?”
  4. Description of Penzance Brewing Company’s Trink pale ale in the programme for a local beer festival: “…featuring the ever-so-now Citra hop”.
  5. Another brewer on Twitter: “We’ve given in and brewed a beer with Citra now everyone else has stopped going on about it.”
  6. Numerous beer geeks: “Needs more hops.”

Lots of people don’t know what hops are or what they contribute to beer.

Many others don’t understand that different hop varieties, in different proportions, added at different times in the process, affect the flavour of the finished beer.

And hardly anyone can actually tell the difference between one hop variety and another from the aroma and taste alone. (We certainly can’t, though we make a lucky guess now and then, and God knows we’ve tried.)

The very idea that there might be fashionable hops would surprise many.

In conclusion, we think hyper-awareness of hops is one of the biggest differences between those who simply enjoy beer and those who obsess over it, and it’s another thing to add to the list of perspective checks.

Picture by Duncan from Flickr Creative Commons.

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.

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’.

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?

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.

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?’.

Natural Tensions

Of course British brewing is not “one big happy family”.

We recently heard about an incident where the owner of a well-established small brewery got drunk and physically assaulted the  head of a new ‘craft brewery’ he thought was muscling in on his territory.

We read this post in which a British real ale brewer kicks back against what he calls “the pretentious-isation” of beer — something which, although they wouldn’t necessarily call it that, is a key part of the business model for many new breweries.

On Twitter, we read cryptic comments from brewers slyly criticising the work of unnamed competitors. (Yes, competitors, despite the friendships and connections.)

And need barely mention The Scottish Brewery (many bloggers consider it bad luck to write their name before a performance…) and their frequent attacks on, or dismissals of, their peers.

That’s not to say there isn’t collaboration and community. We’ve heard first hand from small brewers about the help and advice they’ve had from other, better established breweries; and can you imagine the head baker at Warburton’s collaborating on a special bread with a small bakery in Cumbria?*

These tensions might become more apparent as the market reaches saturation point and, though they make sensitive punters like us squirm, they’re entirely natural and understandable. After all, many of the people involved have a lot at stake.

*This material previously released in an edited form on Twitter...

I, Bitter Drinker

British people are often culturally programmed to choose a certain type of tipple, even before they touch a drop.

Consider the socially-conditioned bitter drinker, a type we know personally and well. These are blokes who don’t really have strong feelings about beer but know what they’re not: lager louts, party animals, pretentious, ‘continental’, fizzy. A pint of bitter (John Smith’s Extra Smooth, London Pride, whatever’s at hand) just fits their identity, and that’s that.

Perhaps it’s that a pint of bitter, though some might call it boring, seems to them vaguely counter-cultural — representative of a kind of quiet contrariness, like indie music and rambling. It signals their place in a minority, where they feel at home, without being at all ostentatious.

None of the blokes we’ve got in mind are CAMRA members. Bitter is bitter is bitter. For them, it’s not something to campaign for or think too much about.

What would ever make the confirmed bitter drinker order something different at the bar? It’s hard to imagine. Our suspicion is that the more you market at him, the more stubborn he’ll get: “Pint of bitter, please.”