What makes a great beer?

It also has a lot to do with expectations. If you're expecting swill and get something drinkable you may end up having a better impression of the beer than if you were expecting greatness and received something that was merely excellent.

 

Both play an important role. Yet, everything is in the hands of the beer holder. You might think Sucks is great (I do as well), yet there's others that disagree. If you think a beer is great and I disagree, who am I to argue?

 

Personally, it's my favorite beer. I have a 32oz bottle in my fridge to have -- I haven't had Sucks for a little over a year now. Interested to see if I like it just as much.

I've wondered the same thing. I'm pretty sure no one else gets it (because I never see it mentioned), but I always get a tea flavor in Lagunitas's IPAs. I don't know what causes that, but it's what I think makes them (most especially Sucks) so damn good. This wasn't exactly relevant to the question you asked, but...

 

Tastes good.

 

Balance! That was an easy one

 

Yes, and don't forget dry hopping, fermentation temps, sanitation, bottle conditioning/kegging and last but not least, tasting.

 

For me a great beer has the ability to have both complexity and a sense of balance.

The complexity can be a BIG complexity (e.g., Quads, Barrel aged Imperial Stout, etc.) or a more subtle complexity (e.g., a Franconian Kellerbier, Kolsch, etc.) but all of the flavors and beer qualities need to be in balance and complementary.

I am not a music person but the best analogy would be the music you obtain from an orchestra where all of the varying instruments together make wonderful sound (music).

The conductor gets a lot of acclaim for the quality of music from an orchestra. I would suggest that the analogy continues with the brewer being analogous to the conductor.

I just want to re-quote what @hopnado mentioned of “the knowledge and talent of the brewers.” When I read that statement the first name that popped into my mind was Shaun Hill of Hill Farmstead.

Cheers!

 

Any combination of,
Nuance,
Complexity,
and Balance.

 

From what I understand brewing comes down to attention to detail. Everything has to be exact for the beer to be consistently good. The malt has to have the correct convertible sugar levels, the water has to be free of all contaminates, the vessels and tools have to be sanitized, the yeast has to be healthy, strike water has to be the correct temp, the grains need to mash for a certain amount of time, and so on..... I think the difference between good beer and great beer is attention to detail.

Or maybe they just got lucky once and have been able to replicate it. My guess is they are very detail oriented brewers.

 

It also has to be hyped to the extreme in the following way: an article about it has to appear in a mainstream magazine (Esquire, Vanity Fair, etc.) raving about how great it is so that people who don't know any better will go to their local bottle shop in the middle of August and ask for KBS or BCBS or Heady Topper (the last one is only funny when they don't live anywhere near Vermont).

 

This is like saying the best music is what is so loud your ears can't even make sense of it and you can't hear anything for two days. A shitty rock concert with grandpa as the sound engineer?

 

Balance and craftsmanship - by which I mean the quality and consistency in a beer. New Glarus beers have great craftsmanship: every beer tastes excellent across mutiple styles vs. a brewery that brews a few hits and then has terrible other beers.