MdV E-News Oct. 8, '08: Non-Extreme Beers

MdV: Merchant du Vin beer e-newsletter – Wednesday October 8, 2008: Non-Extreme Beer

MdV & fine beer in the news

Merchant du Vin's benchmark imports continue to gain more attention in the media:

-Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale was mentioned as one of the late actor Paul Newman's favorite beers in the Sept. 15, '08 issue of the National Enquirer - take a look right here.

-Delta Sky magazine had a nice review of Samuel Smith's Organic Cider in the Sept. '08 issue; noted drinks writer F. Paul Pacult called it lovely & crisp, with a "clean, yeasty flavor, apple-pastry aroma, saber-edged aftertaste . . . ".

-BeerAdvocate Magazine

gave an "A" review to Ayinger Oktober Fest-Marzen in Vol. II Issue 8 (Sept. '08).

-Samuel Smith's Organic Cider was "Beer of the Week," in September at the Beverage Testing Institute.

-The Seattle P-I featured Ayinger Oktober Fest-Marzen with a nice photo in a Sept. 16, '08, roundup of fall seasonal beers.

A full current news listing is always on our news page; you can also check local beer tastings, dinners and festivals on our national events page and read previous html versions of this newsletter at our e-news archive. If you are interested in beer glassware, clothing and collectables we also have an online e-store.

Non-extreme beers

When you are talking about beer - whether you are a friend talking to another friend, a beer writer posting an article, or a brewery sales rep - you sometimes have to transfer information across the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity: you are using words to express a sensory experience.

How can anybody really know how something tastes to somebody else? (For that matter, how do we even know that the color blue looks the same to one as it does to another?) Furthermore, who made the rules about describing taste? Are there rules?

Some food flavors can be used to describe other flavors: noting the flavor "tomato" means something, for example, whether the tomato associated is an heirloom variety out of your garden, sun-warmed & eaten off the vine, or whether it's a canned tomato. Lemons, mint, pepper, oranges, berries - there are many simple foods that have become flavor descriptors. And while we may not be sure that a tomato tastes the same to all, we can at least have a pretty strong clue: a group often agrees that something tastes "tomato-y." Or lemony. Or minty.

Then there are prepared foods that have some approach to universal understanding among people, or at least Westerners: sugar, caramel, toffee; there are non-foods that have associations: hay, grass, leather, earth; there are creative comparisons: Pad Thai, mole, Yorkshire pudding. (Hmmm . . . why don't we ever use beers to describe other foods? " Recently I had Yorkshire pudding that tasted like Nut Brown Ale. I also had Chicken Mole at a nice Mexican restaurant that had distinct Rochefort 8 overtones . . . ")

But using words to describe a subjective sensual experience can arouse another challenge. We've noticed that extreme flavors - very strong, reeeeeeally bitter, extremely sour, or roasty enough to peel the enamel off your teeth - often draw the most raves and inflated hyperbole from beer aficionados. In reviews they often rate extreme beers the highest, similar to the way that some folks might want the Hottest Possible Hot Sauce so they can then put Massive Amounts of it on their food. (Is this group mostly young men, proving their toughness?) In fact, two food categories that appear to reward "over the top, shocking, extreme" flavors a lot are spiciness/hot sauce, and non-mainstream extreme beers.

We like extreme beers sometimes - after all, we import Lindemans Cuvee Rene, Rochefort 10, and Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout - and nothing is more perfect at the end of an evening. But we sometimes wonder: what happened to subtlety? The vine-ripened heirloom tomato, sun-warm, is certainly not an extreme over-the-top flavor. What distinguishes it from an average tomato is really somewhat subtle. The perfect potato - baked, fried, or whatever - is not extreme; the finest dessert is not the most strong-flavored; the greatest salad is not the one with the most vinegar in the dressing.

Maybe we see this trend because objective measures are easier to write about. For example, "I like bitter beers. This one is more bitter than the last one. Therefore I like this one better than the last one." Perhaps a high ration of beer reviewers are young & in their "more equals better" years. And possibly some beer reviewers are boasting - in what they consider is a subtle way - by pointing out their more developed palettes: "Oh, it took me a while to grow into these full-flavored beers. You'll get there some day."

But let's celebrate the wide range of styles and flavors in beer. Let's not take the easy way by going for the most, all the time. Let's raise a toast to subtlety in flavor: