Beer Lovers vs. Beer Snobs

verb (used with object), –rat·ed, –rat·ing.

to rate or appraise too highly; over­es­ti­mate: I think you over­rate their polit­i­cal influence.

(accord­ing to dictionary.com)There are so many dif­fer­ent places for me to start from, writ­ing this arti­cle, but I am going to pick one and go from there. If I take off on a tan­gent, please bear with me.I enjoy drink­ing craft beer.

When my father-in-law orders a beer for me, he ask’s the server what “designer beers” they have. This is slightly a jab at my “refined” tastes, but it con­veys the mes­sage. Plus, he only drinks Crown Royal (dou­ble shot, three rocks), so his appre­ci­a­tion for my appre­ci­a­tion is much appreciated.

When some­body tells me that they don’t like beer, I ask them what beer they have tried. Usu­ally it’s one of the big three. I tell them that they just haven’t tried the right beer. There are so many great beers out there, they are bound to find one they like. This doesn’t always go over, but at least I tried. Since turn­ing legal drink­ing age, I can con­sumed a myr­iad of dif­fer­ent brands and styles of beer. The big brew­eries put out their ver­sions of craft beer and slap an artsy label on it to con­fuse con­sumers, but you know what? I’ll try it. If it’s a good exam­ple, I will prob­a­bly buy it again. If not I wont, and I’ll move on to the next one.

After spend­ing a good por­tion of my adult life in Ore­gon, I have always chuck­led when I hear the term beer snob, due to the Ore­gon Brew­ers Guild acronym: S.N.O.B.

In today’s Amer­ica and, I imag­ine, the whole world, the num­ber of func­tion­ing brew­eries is stag­ger­ing. Big ones and small ones, all pump­ing out prod­uct for the con­sumers to, well, con­sume. Some is cheap. Some ain’t. Some is good. Some is GREAT. Some ain’t.

The beer that is good seems to get left by the way­side some­times. I will not name names, but I’m sure every­one here can think of cer­tain craft beers that get a bad rap for being too “main­stream.” Why is this?

I have a neigh­bor, whom I fre­quently see stand­ing on his patio drink­ing a 32 oz. Miller High Life. One day, I saw him drink­ing a bot­tle of Fat Tire.

There are two ways I could have looked at this: I could have thought to myself; 1) Fat Tire is beer that a High Life drinker would like, or 2) Fat Tire is a beer that a High Life drinker could like.

I always go with the lat­ter. It could be because even now, after my age of enlight­en­ment, I still crack open a cold PBR or High Life (yes, shud­der… I’ll be okay.) Or it could be because I enjoy see­ing peo­ple take a chance or just do some­thing dif­fer­ent. This is not say­ing that I could begin to com­pare an Amber ale to a clas­sic Amer­i­can pil­sner, but it’s not such an extreme step off in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion that a begin­ner wouldn’t like it. Per­haps you could call it a “gate­way” beer; a beer that might guide some­one deeper into the craft beer pool.

Per­son­ally, I could take almost any extreme beer you could put in front of me and either pro­ceed it or fol­low it by any other. Arro­gant Bas­tard fol­lowed by Blue Moon fol­lowed by Pliny fol­lowed by High Life. I cer­tainly have my pref­er­ence for which beers I would rather have, but if there’s a beer offered, I just may partake.This being said, I think there is a cer­tain merit for crit­i­cism. I imag­ine this thought is in the major­ity, oth­er­wise there would be no BJCP style guide­lines and craft beer as we know it would be vastly dif­fer­ent. This in itself brings a cer­tain fac­tor of snob­bery, if you will, to the table. BJCP sanc­tioned beer com­pe­ti­tions are judged by BJCP cer­ti­fied judges, obvi­ously (Dis­claimer: I am not a cer­ti­fied, or even rec­og­nized, BJCP judge so all of my opin­ions are just that). In the past, I have heard dis­grun­tled rum­blings that judges are unwill­ing to award a per­fect score to a beer no mat­ter what it is. Per­haps it is my level of un-educated-ness that allows me to think that there are a ton of “per­fect” beers out there. Cer­tainly, using this venue, I could nit pick every beer I drank and find some flaw, real or imag­ined, and write about what the brewer did wrong or could have done bet­ter. How­ever, I was not with the brewer when they designed or brewed the beer. I was not privy to the thoughts that influ­enced the cre­ation of this recipe, nor do I have the inside scoop on what the brewer was try­ing to accom­plish with this beer. There­fore, if there is some­thing I per­cieve in this beer that I am not fond of, I can’t very well say it’s a flaw, because I don’t know if the brewer wanted it to be that way. Hell, it may have just been some­thing that was decided at the last minute to add or just some exper­i­men­tal ingre­di­ent. “Hey, let’s see what peo­ple think if we fer­ment this beer with Brett!” “Hey, let’s see what peo­ple think if we put this beer in a wine bar­rel for a year!” “Hey, let’s see what peo­ple think if we replace part of the grain bill with malted corn or rice…” ect.I have never claimed to be an expert beer taster, nor have I ever claimed to be an expert brewer… or even an expert drinker for that mat­ter. I do not agree with rat­ing a beer on a scale of any sort other than “I like it” or “I don’t care for it.” But then again, the first time I tried Arro­gant Bas­tard, it was too much for me. Hell, the first time I tried Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale, I thought “This isn’t beer.”

I don’t like rat­ing beers because this means, in my mind, com­par­ing one to another. The say­ing goes that if you ask 10 brew­ers for a recipe for a cer­tain style of beer, you’ll get 15 dif­fer­ent recipe’s. Each one aims to accom­plish some­thing dif­fer­ent. If you go to a bar with a decent selec­tion of beer, you will see sev­eral pale ales, sev­eral IPA’s, sev­eral stouts… ect. Per­son­ally, I may enjoy one over the other, but it doesn’t mean that the other one is less of a beer, or that the one I like is worth more than the other.

Crit­i­cism, as a learn­ing tool, can be fan­tas­tic. If you give 10 peo­ple, who know what they are doing, a taste of some­thing and allow them to give you feed­back, you may change your recipe a bit. If you just want to have fun, you may say “screw it, I’m gonna do what I want to do.”

Crit­i­cism, as a ves­sel to make your­self look bet­ter or more knowl­edge­able, just isn’t that con­struc­tive. In the end, I will leave you with this:
I once read a quote, “It is bet­ter to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”