How often do you get labeled a “beer snob” or ...

How i handle all my problems including beer ones.
I'll add i smile as I assess and walk away

 

Easter dinner about 5 or so years ago. I saved a bottle of HF Dorothy to share with family (which was very rare to me and my last HF beer that I mulled home from a trip to VT the year prior). My Aunt took the bottle and started to pour some Dorothy in her glass with ice and some remnants of watery iced tea in the bottom. I jumped up and said “no don’t do that!” and the whole dinner conversation went silent. I said I’d get her a clean glass and apologized for the crazy outburst. Question: How many of you would have reacted similarly? Is this considered beer snobbery? My aunt is adventurous and likes the craft beer I always share with her but she doesn’t really buy any (probably only has craft beer a few times a year when she comes over for Holiday meals)

 

Nothing wrong with being a beer snob. My wife and I have joked: she's a coffee snob, I'm a beer snob. We can live with it. Generally I've found that people think I'm weird to like nice beer not so much because it's nice ("craft," etc.) and they like AAL, but because the vast majority of people I know prefer wine to beer. (I've been to a lot of parties and get-togethers where there is literally no beer at all, but a lot of wine.) They think being a beer snob is strange because they are wine snobs.

 

More typically I'll have some nice beer (once 3 Fonteinen, hard to find and expensive), someone pours a generous helping, tastes it, makes a face, and the beer sits unfinished and goes to waste. I have to keep cool. Once on a camping trip I had packed a few cans of different beers. An acquaintance grabbed a can of Old Chub, tasted it, and poured the rest of the can into the grass, assuming the beer was "spoiled."

 

Ditto. Self proclaimed.

 

I will call myself a beer snob when I don't feel like explaining anything or talking to someone.

Picky is a much better way of describing my taste for beer. I have no problem drinking AALs, but I refuse to drink light/diet beers. I drink more IPA than anything, but hate hazys for stealing the name from clear, amber, bitter beers.

 

I've had the opposite experience with wine people and lambics that aren't too funky, or really Belgian-style beers in general. They get into it.

 

This is one that always is weird to me. Most people have their thing or two whether it's wine, beer, BBQ, specific food genres, cocktails, or even non-food related things like collectables. Whenever I see someone potentially too passionate about a given topic my feeling is good for them, glad they have things they enjoy.

The line for me is always down to how you treat other people. Liking better beer (or anything "better") doesn't make you better than anyone. I'll advocate for what I like all day but no need to indulge in snobby behavior, even if I would jokingly call myself a snob.

 

Snob: (noun) a person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.

Never thought of myself as a beer snob, more of a beer enthusiast. Respectful of people's choices, but will to try to guide them to expand their horizons if they are open to it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.

 

Every time that I go out with my girlfriend, & she orders a Michelob Ultra, & I am cross referencing the draft list with BA.

 

This describes several of my in-laws, although in all fairness to them they will sometimes stock a token amount of beer (typically like an 805 or similar, thinking that it is at least not an AAL so it therefore must be "good") for me since they know I will usually go the beer route instead of wine. Interestingly enough, we did a blind tasting for some of the wine snobs and some of them could not even distinguish between a white and a red when they were blindfolded.

 

What's fun to do is flip the script on the people that have called me a beer snob over the years. It's typically the people I know that only drink Mich Ultra. I tell them that THEY are the beer snobs...

They are too good to drink any other beer than Mich Ultra because no other beer fits their uppity, skinny, fitness image. Eventhough Busch Light and Miller Lite have basically the same nutrition facts as Mich Ultra...Miller Lite and Busch Light are too cheap and don't convey the same image.

 

In general, I don't think it's something anybody cares about anymore - "they" have gotten used to us! don't recall the missus and I ever being openly called beer snobs. When I was working, my boys were pretty much in the macro crowd and they'd poke fun at me - most of them knew I was a BA and that I kept a beer spreadsheet. They'd ask what i drank over the weekend - I would tell them about my one or two and sometimes they were actually interested. Now that I'm retired most of my beer friends are here...

We don't get preachy or try to "convert" anybody. It's pointless. Sort of like teaching a pig to sing - it won't work, you'll get frustrated and it annoys the hell outta the pig.

Usually don't drink beer or anything alcoholic when we go out to eat unless it's a taproom or brewery with food and that puts us with our own species anyway.

I do remember us going to a tasting one time and there was one dude even we decided was a snob (or possibly just a pompous ass) - the head brewer was directing the tasting, probably 30 people participating, and there's that one guy who thought he knew more than the brewer - to me that air of superiority makes the snob.

Shopping- we do get the occasional eye-roll at the checkout counter (depending on the store) when our few beers ring up a much greater cost than the next person in line with two thirty racks of Natty Lite. But it's really no one's business how either of us chooses to spend their money.

When we have people over, we know the audience and I'll have suitable beverages on hand - not macros but maybe an "easy" craft like Jacks Abby lagers that aren't really a challenge to the palate. We've had tastings with "craft curious" friends and that's been fun with varied results and reactions. We have one good friend who will try whatever I put in his hand- and he will finish it even if I can tell he doesn't really like it.

When we visit people it's "when in Rome". I'll certainly drink a non-craft option as the situation warrants or just politely decline.

Generally we are in the drink whatever you like camp and don't make a big deal about it either way. To each their own. Maybe we are "undercover snobs"

 

Never been called one to my face but I also have no problem drinking whatever's available if I'm a guest somewhere.

 

^^^ This

 

I feel like that was a thing maybe 15 years ago. I haven't experienced that in forever. I've never been one to talk bad about [insert macro beer] beyond questioning the purpose of light beer, so that probably helps. If normal Bud, MGD, Banquet, Corona, etc. is flowing, I'm happy to join in.

 

I’d go for the sex
Even if I ended up in the water, it’d be nice
And a lot better than the coots light


And I grew up in Golden Colorado and could smell the malt from the plant

 

I think there’s a neon sign outside my place that says this.