Devils Backbone Brewing Company Partners with Anheuser-Busch

I'm certainly no connoisseur but I can get just as much enjoyment out of a great czech pils as I can a great IIPA. There's nothing wrong with that, you know...

 

LOL at five "professionals" somehow having better taste than 5000 Beer Advocate raters. It's completely subjective. To me, beer is a democracy, every person's vote counts once.

 

And I'd prefer drinking a nice glass of cold water over the finest czech pils.

 

Yeah, Heady Topper is totally hype shit. Just give me a Devil's Backbone Vienna Lager. LOL.

 

With 4000 or so craft breweries in the USA, this is just a drop in the bucket.

 

@RKP1967, why so much hyperbole!?!

Cheers!

 

Just my opinions. I repect that yours may differ.

Cheers!

 

I only wish I could like this post a thousand times. Confirmation bias plays a huge role in the ratings here; no one wants to be the person to tell the emperor he got taken on his new clothes. Further, a lot of people here and other beer-focused sites judge The Next Beer they're going to have against every other beer out there vs. its peer group. So, someone who loves a 13% BBA imperial stout is going to give a lager a half-star. It's silly.

 

I haven't had the beers, and the styles they brew aren't the styles I generally drink anyway. Good for them. The only aspect of this that concerns me at all is the statement that DB beers will be available nationwide. There really isn't any more room in my local liquor stores or in my local pubs, to add new brands. Where a brand forces its way in through sheer popularity or quality, that's fine. I'm pleased to see Singlecut beers in coolers now. But where something steals shelf space by association with the big boys, I'm generally not going to be happy.

 

Hahaha, thanks for the laugh, seriously.

So drinking beers that you have to pay $100+ for in the secondary market (or stand in line 6 hours for) make you a beer connoisseur? Perhaps you'd like to discuss how Michael Jackson wasn't a beer connoisseur, since the Double BA Chocolate Coffee Vanilla Bean brewers pube stouts didn't exist in his days?

All beers are for me, including the ones that aren't driven by hype. But by all means, leave the Vienna lagers and pilsners to non-connoisseur peasants like myself.

 

And vice versa. I've seen plenty of people rate DIPA's, sours, and stouts lowly based on the mere fact that they don't like the style.

 

do a little research on gov terry and you will see he was / is and will eventually be sent to jail for all of his insider trading scams, his global warming scams and his scams with the Clintons . this guy is as dirty as it gets when it comes to politicians...and that's not saying too much...he is a scam artist in every sense of the word. you are so correct in asking , why would a political hack, especially the gov, make a statement like this. it is bc he is a crook and probably got something from the deal.

 

You should research what it takes to become a beer judge. They're not just volunteers. I've made beers that taste fantastic but didn't score high because something wasn't exactly to style. Some of those beers I continue to make because I really like them, I just don't enter them in competitions again. I want to scream every time I read a BA review with a low score and its obvious they just don't like the style. Sorry but I'll take a certified judge's opinion over the average BA any day.

 

I'm not a brewer, but what's so special about "brewing to style"? This is America, not Germany. If every brewer brewed to style, all beers in a style would taste the same. If all pizzas were made "to style" all pizzas would the same. If all dark chocolates were brewed "to style", all dark chocolates would be the same. If all art was done "to style", art would be pretty fuicking boring.

Where is creativity in making something that meets some preconceived notion of what it should be?

 

I think maybe his point was that Terry had been very active in the efforts to lure other craft brewers (e.g. Stone, Deschutes) to VA, so it seems somewhat ironic that he was lauding the takeover of one of VA's biggest craft breweries by AB-Inbev. I guess whatever makes the State the most tax dollars is his ultimate goal rather than some high-minded championing of independent businesses.

 

You are saying contradictory things, at least to me. While I think those judges are better trained than most BAs, and while I value the blind tasting, reviewing strictly to style is a negative to me. Treehouse Julius would fail miserably in these competitions.

I want a system that rewards creativity, that rates most highly those beers that taste and smell the best. Since that's totally subjective, it's almost pointless.

 

That’s just how it’s done. You have to have guidelines to judge to. I’ve been in a couple bracketed competitions but those weren’t sanctioned competitions and they did just have volunteer judges, like local professional brewers. In BJCP I think there are 27 main categories with multiple subcategories so all beer will not taste the same. There is enough wiggle room in the style guidelines that styles will not taste the same.

 

There are categories for creativity, the Alternative Fermentables category and Specialty Beer categories for example.

 

yeah, the Adventure Packs were good. Collabs with Surly, Wicked Weed, Sun King, others. That said, I agree that upstarts like Three Notch'd and Champion are passing them in quality. Even Lost Rhino is making quality sours and imperial stouts. Plus new breweries like Ocelot, Aslin and Pen Druid are knocking them out of the water.

 

I look for creativity within the style. Ayinger Celebrator might be the only beer brewed to a traditional style that I'll even buy. My fondness for craft beer grows when it breaks through style boundaries and improves upon what was.