Hype is not a flavor...

If you really believe what you wrote here I suggest you consider doing two things in your future posts.

1. Avoid the use of words such as "disingenuous" which for many people is associated with certain pejorative synonyms such as: insincere, dishonest, untruthful, false, deceitful, duplicitous, lying, hypocritical.

2. Avoid extreme generalities in which you lump all other people on this site into the same category, e.g., "everyone" "all" etc. There is not a single univariate answer or computer program that describes adequately the diversity of this audience.

You are dealing with an unusual audience here that includes at least some people who have studied, worked with, or researched the type of things that fall under the heading of "hype" as the term tends to be used around here. From some of the posts I've seen (and other discoverable factors) there are some folks on this site who understand beer, tasting biases, have considerable tasting experiences (including training in recognizing and identifying tastes and biases), statistics, behavioral science research, engineering, physical science research, etc., etc. and who often make it a practice to put procedures in place to help compensate for what you loosely call hype.

 

I use hype to seek a beer that I haven't had. If all of you on BA say that a beer is great, then of course I want to try it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I've had great, good and bad beers from following hype, but my palate has been expanded. Thanks to all for the hype and cheers!!

 

Hype tends to affect me negatively. If a beer has high barriers to entry, my expectation is that it must be proportionally better to my palate than every other beer I can easily pick up off a shelf. This seldom proves to be the case.

Using stouts as an example, if I were so inclined, I could visit a single bottle shop near me today and pick up a three batch vertical of Big Bad Baptist, cases of Plead the 5th and BA Siberian Night, and bottles of BA Total Eclipse, Dark Apparition, Oil of Aphrodite, the entire BORIS/DORIS line, etc. If I go to another bottle shop or two, I can add in Odin's Tipple, Dark Force, plenty of Evil Twin variant stouts, and so forth. As far as my palate is concerned, I can believe there are stouts out there that are better than those beers. I can't believe that any of them are an order of magnitude above and beyond all of those shelf beers, to the point that I would consider the extra effort to acquire and try them to be worth it. That's with having had KBS, BCBS, Abraxas, and Abyss, among others. If I run across a hyped beer in the normal course of my beer-related activities, I'll happily pick it up and enjoy it, but that's as far as it goes.

Of course, I may just be curmudgeonly beyond my nigh-forty years.

 

But you're REALLY cool when you can inform us that it's just not as good as it used to be. Then you're simultaneously trashing it in a subtle way while informing us that you've been drinking that hyped beer for quite some time, possibly even since before it was hyped!!!!!

 

Interesting you should mention that. I've been thinking about starting up a hype farm. That stuff is a bitch to grow, but it's like liquid gold on the open market. It seems it grows best in small population states, so I think I've got a shot to make it work.

 

You'll want to keep your crop relatively small so that "scarcity marketing" can take hold, but also scatter a few bits of the product here and there, to this one and to that one, more or less at random, so the mystique and desirability of your crop grows as fast as your crop.

 

In all seriousness...we all know that hype affects your thoughts on a beer. It may make you appreciate it more, it may raise your expectations so high that no beer can live up to them, leading to certain disappointment (I think this happened with Heady for me).

I would love to do some blind taste tests where I don't even know what beers I'm drinking. Let someone pick out 4 IPA's or 4 stouts and I try them with absolutely no clue whether I'm drinking whales or turds. That way I can taste them with zero expectations or assumptions.

We did a side by side with Heady, King Sue and XHops Gold back in December. I wish it had been a blind test in retrospect. Interestingly, all three who participated liked the XHops the best, which, as a new release, was the least acclaimed of the three.

Given this conversation, I think I'm going to set up some blind shares where people bring 3-4 bottles but keep them hidden. The others wear blindfolds and try the beers with zero knowledge of what they are (other than style I think). Has anyone ever done something like this?

 

Of course. It works best if one person takes one for the team and does all the buying/co-ordinating/pouring. If everyone brings 3-4 bottles, then at the very least, you know what your bottles are before pouring. Also, it's pretty obvious when pouring your can of Heady Topper vs a bomber of King Sue.

 

Based on the OP's account, my first thought is that hype/expectations may not be the root of the issue. Tastes and preferences shift and change. Not only in the long term, but also from day to day. There have been plenty of times I've opened a beer I know I love, and been less than satisfied; only to revisit it some time later and fall in love all over again. I'm reluctant to blame it on false hype, a change in recipe, Obama, etc. Sometimes it's as simple as not being in the "mood" for a particular beer or style on a given day. A bourbon coffee stout is not what you would call and every-day-drinker. Think about it--are you always in the mood for steak? Or chicken, spaghetti, sushi, or pizza? Ok, maybe pizza, but you get the idea.

 

Yes, big believer in blind tasting. We do it completely blind with a neutral third party (usually a wife but they don't work for free) pouring in the kitchen and the tasters not being shown or told anything, not even what style is presented.

 

At a personal level you might also want to try out this taste test procedure (it's easiest if you can get someone to help by doing the pouring to ensure you are "blind" to what you are sampling):

http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2...st-that-can-help-you-save-money/#.Uf92HMu9KSM

Which is one often used by the sensory test pros in their work:

http://www.sensorysociety.org/knowledge/sspwiki/Pages/Triangle Test.aspx

 

From post number 11:

"If this is something you desire to do then you need to make the effort to drink beer totally blind (i.e., not knowing what the beer is). You need to get help from a partner to pour the beer for you so that you have no idea what you are drinking. This is truly the only method to assess a beer "unbiased and open-minded"."

Cheers!

 

Not going to lie. I am heavily influenced by hype. Everyone gets excited about something, and I want in on it too! That being said I have been burned a few times. Grapefruit Sculpin comes to mind.

But I am especially excited to try KBS since FBS is a top five stout for me.

 

For those who are willing to conduct a triangle taste testing it is critical that the beers have identical appearances if you are using clear glasses for this testing. Otherwise you will need to use opaque glasses.

Here is an example of a taste testing that I conducted recently, my wife kind enough to do the pouring: http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/new-beer-sunday-week-580.402889/#post-4657907

Cheers!

 

Other people.

And typically, the reaction against hype doesn't result in an indifference to it, but in anti-hype, by which one takes pride in not drinking beers reputed to be super fantastic.

We're all some weak critters.

 

Just did a blind hops tasting last weekend for some friends. Julius, PseudoSue, and Xhops Gold were three of the lowest ranked beers by everybody.

 

I am counting 13 beers here. Did you folks sample taste all 13 beers? That sounds like quite the undertaking!! I have never done anything like this but I wonder how 'resilient' my palate would be after the fifth or sixth beer. Did you use palate cleansers between beers?

Cheers!

 

I used to love KBS. It's still a really great beer, but I have found myself going through less to get some. If I walk into a store and its just sitting there, I grab it. If not, oh well. I liked Sunday Morning Stout better and that is much easier to obtain.

 

Yeah I can see that point of view too. I just tend to feel like if you've had, say, the 19 top rated IPAs but you haven't had heady (for the sake of argument let's say it's #1 on the list), you may tend to build that up higher in your mind since "it's #1! It must blow all of these away!" Then when you have it, you may think it's only marginally better than your previous favorite or maybe even not as good, so you wind up disappointed. It depends on how much you let yourself hype it up I suppose.

 

In hindsight there were too many beers but cleansers were used and we did it in two stages with a food break in the middle.