The Problem with Turning Beer into Dessert

Had a great Honey Stout with Cocoa nibs, locally sourced honey and graham crackers. Excellent beer and will be one to go back to when available.

Tomorrow night it is a Cinnamon Toast Crunch Pastry Stout. I am glad I found this style of beer.

 

I too enjoy sipping on battery acid

 

Sincere apologies in advance for this post my good man. I like it better when you join in though:

Kidding. (but not about the apology )

I respectfully think you are making poor analogies. There are not objective metrics to determine better or worse works in the arts. There are socially constructed conventions, tastes, and reputations that shift. (Like with beer.) Using your Hitchcock example. He was once considered a craftsman who was good at entertaining the masses with fluff. He was your mac and cheese example rather than the opposite. His reputation as an "artist" was something that evolved over time - partially due to reappraisals coming from other cultures. So who was correct? Both?

Your comment: "there is no formula that tells us that Casablanca is better than Waterworld. But we can point to things like acting, script-writing, pacing, etc..." is illogical. On the one hand, you are providing a formula for the determination right there, and on the other hand, if you break things down into just the components, who's to say that there is a formula that tells us that a component (performance/script/edit/etc) from one movie is better than the same from another. Similar to Hitchcock, you are using Casablanca as your example because of its position and shared meaning within our culture at this point in time. You are referencing a certain collective (not universal) judgement rather than objectivity. Which brings us to:

By comparing the rating of an IPA to the movement of a chess piece, you are confusing making a judgement with following rules. Those are very different things. Beer rating is subjective... just like the opinions that you are expressing about certain beers in this thread.

I apologize if I have the wrong impression, but your post creates the impression that you are judging your customers (and their value as consumers) based on your personal drinking habits and your own version of "enthusiasm." Your language is so loaded. Someone can paint the same picture a very different way... Don't you think there are people who work in stores who value the customers who dependably drink the same stuff every day vs the customers who are always seeking out something different and new (and are willing to travel to another state to buy their beer from a brewery instead of their local store)?

To you, "it seems like a no-brainer" that a brewery would cater to your "juice beer" customer, but I would think that certain brewers consider it a no-brainer to cater to the "old-heads" instead (to use your words). You state: "the truth is that most people don't want piney pale whatever." Yeah, but most people don't want "stupid thick syrupy smoothie beers" (as you put it in another post) either... but you obviously know that. Anyway, my dumb point is that it's probably best to avoid fighting judgmentalism from others about a sector of beer drinkers with your own judgmentalism about another sector. I know my language sounds harsh but I don't mean it that way towards you.

 

I think Shaun Hill sums up my feelings.

 

A business model based on folks driving internal combustion engines hundreds of miles from cities across the northeast to the last stop before the middle of nowhere doesn't seem like the model to get us there either. He did do some releases of kegs of beer near to here in NY, but he mandated no growler fills, effectively forcing folks to travel to do all drinking of his beer.. He mentions in another writing that he never drinks beer in sunlight, but parties he's hosted for us in past were outdoors, full sun, mid summer. I love the guy, love his philosophy, love his beer, but... maybe not serious enough?

 

Yes.

The problem with trying to make judgements about subjective things like beer (where it seems possible to do by some) is that style parameters were not set arbitrarily as a method of judgement, they were developed as a method to appeal to the tastes of many people so that those people buy them. Subjectivism is built into it, and popularity is the opposite of objective value.

The problem with comparing one form of art against a different form of art is that there are no objective ways to determine value of something enjoyed as a thought-pleasure that is experienced differently by everyone. Which is why music, or art that is enjoyed audibly, is not better, worse, nor capable of being compared to painting, or art that is enjoyed visually. They are both sub forms of art, and as such are equals in that the pleasure they provide is their only value, and pleasure cannot be objectified.

 

I love Monkish but it seems insane to me that this your problem and then you mention breweries that have not 'surrendered to vulgarity' and include Monkish in your list.
The brewery that started out as a Belgian style only brewery, who didn't brew a single IPA and even had a sign in their brewery saying "NO IPAs", to turning around and cashing in on brewing hazy IPAs and selling them for 24 dollars a four pack to people lined up at 5am.

Sounds pretty vulgar to me.

But I guess since they make the type of hyper green hop soup that you prefer, And I guess what you prefer by your own subjective measurement of beer quality, that you wish to somehow push forward as an objective measurment of beer quality, has not 'surrendered to vulgarity' ?

 

Yeah I too was scratching my head at the inclusion of Monkish in the purity list...

 

I try to avoid lactose in any beer these days, especially an IPA. I won't even think of drinking a smoothie style because it's not what I'm interested in when I'm in the mood for beer. I received a Drekker smoothie in a trade (which are very highly regarded) and gave it to someone at work without hesitation.

I've also found that the thiccc stout trend has passed the accepted standard deviation for me. I hear some reviews talk about KBS and BCBS being too thin, which is insane.

Keep in mind, this is not coming from some old grizzled craft beer veteran who started in the 90s. I've been into it for about 3 years now and these things never interested me. To me it smells like a bubble, and eventually the brewers will have to move away from the styles due to diminishing sales.

 

Agreed. We are nation of children with pubic hair and craft beer is starting to reflect that as well. It's not that big of a deal on a "what am I gonna drink" level, as there are still plenty of awesome real beers out there for me. It just sucks to see the maturity level of the whole industry drop. I always get a chuckle when I'm at the liquor store and my son is like "That can is awesome! That can has a robot Frankenstein on it! That can has a shark with gorilla arms on it! Cool!" I want my son to think me perusing beer is boring, not cool. It's like when we see a Jeep Wrangler with 45" tires, a snorkel exhaust, and a skull painted on the back. My son thinks it's the coolest shit ever. Hey, dude, my nine-year old thinks your Jeep is cool, think about that for a minute.

 

It's threads like this that make me appreciate the (apparently rare) bounty of diversity that I have available to me here in CT. It makes me appreciate breweries like Von Trapp, Jack's, OEC, Notch, Nebco, and Counterweight. Are these breweries the best or most hyped in the world? No, but when I buy one of their beers I can be sure of three things: quality, consistency, and value (ok maybe leave OEC out of the value part as they are damn expensive sometimes).

 

I completely understand a lot of the overall sentiment towards pastries/thicc/smoothie etc. But I am curious about lactose specifically. It comes up a lot as being problematic. Sorry for mentioning this anecdote yet again on the main board, but pre-pandemic a lot of Other Half regulars (both in the sense of being active in the OH thread as well as physical proximity to the brewery) would meet up from time to time at the brewery. We would sometimes do blind taste tests (OH's XX single hop DIPA vs ANOther brewery's XX single hop DIPA, etc). Following a lengthy pro vs anti-lactose debate in the OH thread, we did a lactose test. OH make a series of "daydream" beers which are generally a certain beer but with lactose included. i.e. ACE is their all citra DIPA, and Double Citra Daydream is an all citra DIPA with lactose added. When we did the blind taste test the two biggest anti-tose naysayers got it completely wrong, despite all the assertions of creaminess/sweetness that were being mentioned in the thread prior. Someone also brought in a bag of lactose - it had the same flavor profile as iocaine. i.e. practically tasteless...

Of course there are thousands of breweries out there, and I've only had beers from a fraction of them. Maybe there are some that are extremely heavy-handed with lactose (hard to imagine anyone being more heavy-handed than OH with anything), and of course when you start throwing other shit into the mix then it's a different story. But anyway just my 2c.

 

Lactose in IPAs gives an undesired flavor for me. In stouts it's not a taste thing, but my GI track does not agree with it

 

Right that's my question. What is the undesired flavor in IPAs? Raw lactose is practically flavorless and in my (albeit anecdotal) blind taste test example, the two people making the same claims as you, identified the "pure" IPAs as having lactose, and the lactose beers as being the lactose-free ones.....

 

I blame Kristofferson but Cash didn't help by making it popular.

 

This is the fatal flaw I've seen in the position you've laid out in this thread. A smoothie beer isn't the same paradigm as an IPA. Heck a neipa is really a paradigm shift from a more classic IPA (which is a paradigm that contained within itself several subgenres). So we can't just automatically castigate the smoothie aoir as "vulgar beer". We could identify examples of the smoothie style that lacked balance or elegance or carried whatever variety of flaws.

If we want to talk a general slide into vulgarity and crassness then I think @Providence is onto something with calling out the marketing of certain brewers. And I think its probably accurate to say that " craft" beer (for the purpose of this discussion let's call that breweries that started up from the 80s forward) has gone from a fairly uniformally refined and tasteful marketing presentation into an increasingly vulgar, childish, and debased presentation.

Personally, I see where @Dansac is coming from, I see.these gas station candy aisle type beers as being an extension of that childish marketing. But its not as simple as just discounting every beer in those styles. Some are, I'm sure, executed very well if you consider the paradigm they are executed within