Perfectly ordinary beers

A new brewery opened up in Greenville a year and a half, or so ago...lots of people really talking it up, so I go for a visit, they have 8 beers on tap...I get 2 flights of 4, to sample all of their wares. Didn't find one that I would get a pint of, and a couple were just plain "not good'

 

I find that there is always a local bump. People want to support their local breweries and there's definitely a subculture of beer people who hype up these places. I don't really understand the mentality. I have a tendency to overrate beers not available in my area especially if I was lusting after it but I really try hard to control myself in that sense especially because I don't want to get hung up on a hard to get beer If a beer is meh to you, try it again in a few months. Maybe you had a soapy glass, palette fatigue, old package etc. Sometimes breweries will get better too and you'll find the next batch of that same beer is much better. If after a couple chances it's still meh, then move on and decide it just wasn't for you.

 

A carefully crafted, balanced, stylistically-appropriate kolsch, or porter or hefeweizen or quad etc., is not an 'ordinary' beer in my book. For me, the 'ordinary' designation is reserved for the beers that are not so bad as to be memorable, but also don't have the care and attention paid to them to be even good representations of the style, much less standouts.

 

I would have to agree. I'm in the mindset that I would rather have a sipping beer rather than a drinking beer though, especially now that it's 19 degrees outside. Very rarely, even during the summer, will I have more than one beer a day and I often get tired of the beer before I finish a 6 pack.

I think it's great that breweries are experimenting with different flavors that would go well with certain styles, but man, give it a rest with coffee beers.

 

Damn straight!

 

I don't see this as a BA "mindset" at all. In fact, that's one of the things that appeals to me about this site. These folks really appreciate well-made beer of every conceivable style. Yeah, there's a lot of love for big flavored stouts and bold and juicy DIPA's and things like that. That's as it should be. Brewers innovate and take a lot of risks, and beer lovers of all stripes reap the rewards. But why do you suppose that Weihenstephan gets so much respect here? Or Brasserie de Rochefort? Why all of the goses, saisons, and wild sours on WBAYDN, no matter what time of year it is? It doesn't have to be the latest and greatest "WOW!" beer to garner respect here, and I for one appreciate that.

 

To each their own, but I had some Jai Alai in early January that was canned on 12/23 and it was insanely good. Everyone tastes things differently, but I'd find it hard to believe that people wouldn't be happy with at least what I was tasting out of that beer....it might have even been better than my friend's Grapefruit Sculpin keg he bought himself for his birthday...

 

Oh...woops, I came here expecting to talk about Fat Tire. never mind...

 

I wasn't saying big bold flavored beers are not to be enjoyed. I'm saying good, solid, balanced and readily available ones are treated as mediocre because they don't shock the senses. The kind of people that give Two Hearted a 3 because it isn't a 99 IBU tropical juice bomb.

 

In the last 5 years, I've started enjoying normal beers far more than the usual BA/adjunct monster beers I used to dig. I still love lambics and spontaneously/wild fermented items, but I'd almost rather have an amber than a BA stout now.
Normal doesn't have to be bad.

 

What, you don't want to have a MAYBE 1 beer night by drinking a 17% stout on your own? Shocker.

 

In all honesty, I'd probably go the route of a good easier drinking beer than a 1/2 pour of something bigger. That's all $ aside, too. I remember the days of thinking that everything big was nuanced and packed a ton of depth. Now, I don't really think so. The bigger beers have all started to run together for me (with some exceptions), while there's a huge range in a beer like Fat Tire vs. other amber beers.
It sounds like reverse beer snobbing, but I'm really starting to feel that way. It applies to stuff from Hill Farmstead, Casey, and whatnot to - so rarity doesn't really factor in.

 

I agree with you. Everything doesn't have to be "the most special beer in the world", and there is a massive range between "session beers" and the crazy stuff that people don't seem to appreciate as much around here lately.

 

I think there are a lot of things that come into play when we're talking about this. First is history--beers like Pliny the Elder are held up as being the pinnacle of the DIPA, but many of the BAs on here would tell you that part of that is that it was one of the first (I've not had it, so I don't have an opinion). I personally think Zombie Dust falls into this sort of category as well; while I think it's a good beer, I think that it using citra before citra really blew up (every other IPA uses citra hops now, it seems) helped to really blow people away.

The other fact of the matter is that people's taste buds really ARE that different. I've had beers that I thought were god-tier that other people are giving mid 3s and 4s too (and I've tasted quite a few beers, so it's not like I just had my first BA stout, or something), and I've had beers like Heady Topper and Hopslam, where I didn't get what the fuss was about. It's sometimes hard to remember that people perceive different things even out of the same tastes/ingredients, so what beer is about is finding the combinations that work for you. The most successful beers seem to choose combinations and ingredients that appeal to the most people (the citra hop example, or recently, using maple syrup barrels).

 

Yep. Drank more Michelob than anything else when I was in high school.

 

Wonder if anyone brews with coffee beans that are crapped out by those Indonesian cats or raccoons or whatever the hell they are?

CIVETS. http://www.most-expensive.coffee

 

And we thought we were cool. Right?

 

I was NEVER cool.

 

Yup, just taking out the garbage and cleaning the garage here. My one friend has a Chrysler. I have a Dodge.

 

This made me literally laugh out loud. And seriously contemplate whether I'd buy a limited release Civet-shit beer if it were rated 98/100 and universally praised...I pass on overpriced shit from time to time, I think this would be an example of that behavior...