Tastes Like Beer

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – Elvis Costello

I’ve given up on trying to find a beer to my mom’s liking.  For years, I tried to convert my mother, an unpretentious oenophile, to the joy, complexity, & diversity of beer.  There was plenty of light American lager around when I was growing up, & I’m sure she’d tried it & found it unpalatable.  Understandable.  But when I hit drinking age & got into the good stuff, I discovered a whole world beyond that limited, watery, kinda-sweet-kinda-bitter pigeon hole – surely I could find something that would suit her palate.  Guinness, with its roasted coffee notes?  “Tastes like beer.”  Fair enough (she’s not a fan of coffee, either).  Lancaster Strawberry Wheat, light, sweet, fruity?  “Tastes like beer.”  Dogfish Head Festina Peche, also fruity but tart & crisp?  “Tastes like beer”.  Lindemans Framboise, the nuclear option for non-beer drinkers?  “Tastes like beer”.  The closest I got was a hefeweizen I brewed: “If I liked beer, this would be the beer that I’d like”.  Okay, she doesn’t like beer, I’m not going to beat my head against the wall.

Beer fans have all heard this, usually coming from someone we’re trying to convince/convert.  I’m sure many of you out there have had someone who’s been your “project”, typically a significant other, who stymies your efforts with that similar rhetoric: “It’s too ‘beery’.”  And it pisses us off, right?  Because we’ve found that there’s SO MUCH MORE to beer than “beery”.  It invalidates our perception of beer as this magical ambrosia bursting with all sorts of sensory fairy dust, reducing it to “meh”.  Founders Breakfast Stout?  Cuvee des Jacobins?  Busch?  Might as well be the same: “Tastes like beer”.

If you haven’t surmised by now, a large portion of my free time is passed consuming beer content (way more than actual beer, come to think of it).  Today, I spent anywhere from one to 20 minutes at a stretch, over roughly two dozen stretches, reading, listening to, or watching something about beer.  Podcasts, forums, magazines, company websites, books, social media, videos - this is a pretty typical day for me.  A good chunk of that is reviews, listening to or reading people describing a beer that they’re drinking.  Descriptions can be enlightening, vague, or sometimes straight-up confounding.  The reviewers range from BJCP Master Judges to the common BeerAdvocate user, & the vocabulary ranges from accessible & evocative – sherry, caramel, sour black cherry, vinegar, espresso, molasses, pie crust, black pepper – to vague & uninspired – malty, hoppy, spicy, yeasty, boozy – to WTF – asparagus, aspirin, nougat, carbonic acid, carrot omelet.  There are times when it seems that reviewers are in a competition to conjure the most overwrought & obscure flavor parallel they can muster. 

As much as I appreciate beer writing & programs like Cicerone & the BJCP, I think the navel-gazing can get to be a bit much.  Programs like this promote communicating beer in a verbal way, transforming into words what our taste & smell receptors perceive.  This practice definitely has its shortcomings.  I love the way Randy Mosher (always a source of wisdom) put it (& I’m paraphrasing): we experience beer on an emotional level, which is pre-verbal.  It takes a lot of work to translate that sensory information from the emotional center in our brain into words, symbols, in another part. Obviously, much can be lost in the translation.  The smell & flavor of beer is more than the reductionist components it falls into when trying to describe & categorize it.  We may fall back on describing some outlier qualities of a flavor profile (chocolate, coffee, pomegranate, honey, whatever), but there are fundamental qualities of beer that just can’t be put into words. 

Beer tastes like BEER!  There’s no other word for the family of flavors born of the combination of malt, hops, yeast, & water – it’s beyond verbalization, beyond reductive description.  This is what my mother & all the other outsiders who “just don’t get it” are still in touch with, something the “experienced” might lose sight of.  At its core, beer can’t be broken down into the sum of its parts because it has something unique, something we as beer drinkers love but may take for granted.  It’s something we can’t put our fingers on, that might turn others off but, deep down, is what we love about it.  So if you find yourself getting caught up by how to describe the dankness of an IPA’s hops or the breadiness of a doppelbock’s malt, just let it be.  Let it be & just experience the beer without words, without interference from our evolved brain.  Just feel it & let it work its magic without analyzing or judge; keep it in the realm of emotion, where its most at home.

I’ve encouraged readers in the past to “think when you drink”.  Now I want you to feel.