Wednesday, June 6, 2012

I Drink Beer

Last night I tweeted that "I like beer that tastes like beer".

Speaking purely for myself, if I want to drink something that doesn't taste like beer, I'll drink something other than beer, cider for example. Indeed, during the summer months there are many times when I would much rather have a pint of cider than some flaccid "lawnmower beer" drunk at the temperature of Antarctica on a particularly cold day. Heck, I'd sooner have a long glass of cold water than some of the beers, whether "craft" or otherwise, that are apparently good for refreshment after a session in the garden.

I am not a Reinheitsgebot fundamentalist, but there have been several times in the last few weeks when I have wondered if some brewers have gone from "pushing the envelope" to "jumping the shark"?

There are enough flavours from the malt, yeast and hops to keep a beer drinker happy and enjoying the complexities of beer without resorting to chucking fruit, honey or whatever happens to be at hand into the boil. I realise that there are beer traditions which use judicious amounts of fruit and spices, and strangely I have no issue with that, it is the "innovative" brewers making strange concoctions like gorilla snot and coconut bitter that bug my head.

Perhaps I am just a staid and boring, happy to sit in a proper pub, drinking a proper pint of properly made beer. Thankfully there are plenty of brewers out there making classic beers, that taste like beer, to those brewers, I salute you.

4 comments:

  1. The desire to innovate is one of the main drivers of human progress, and you never know, one day some of this craft artisanal piss might be drinkable.

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  2. I was in London a few days ago. You just can't beat sitting in a pub drinking a pint of ESB and reading the newspaper.

    Innovation is:

    1. Usually not anything genuinely new
    2. mostly not much cop either

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  3. Ron -- I agree that it's annoying to hear breweries describe themselves as innovative and then recycle the same four or five US-style 'innovations', but the idea that there's nothing new to be done with beer makes me feel slightly sad.

    (You do say 'usually', to be fair.)

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  4. Yank brewers jumped the shark when they started the whole bourbon barrel thing a couple of decades ago. IIRC, this pre-dated the whole imperialisation trend.

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