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.
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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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteInnovation is:
1. Usually not anything genuinely new
2. mostly not much cop either
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.
ReplyDelete(You do say 'usually', to be fair.)
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.
ReplyDelete