Not a single night in Aggieville elapses without the occurrence of at least two kinds of culinary injustice: consider the person in a crowd who edges meekly up to the bar, requests a “Bourbon County Stout” and is denied, and also consider everyone else at every other bar, slamming their fists upon the counter and accepting or even demanding some horrid, yellow swill. The sin is not in the denial or acceptance itself, but rather in the mechanism by which this travesty comes to pass.
I'm not “writing one on corporatism,” so to speak; Sierra Nevada, one of the biggest craft brewers in the country, produces in a factory in California several world-class brews. Craft brewery market leader Boston Beer is continually adding new and exotic varieties to its extensive stable, and its famous flagship “Samuel Adams Boston Lager” is available nationwide. Goose Island, out of Chicago, seems unable to produce anything but excellence and its offerings are available to most of the Midwest. These breweries and many, many others produce superb products, ship them all over, and do so at only trivially higher prices. No, craft beer commands only a four-percent market share for a different reason: because of our credulity and susceptibility to slick propaganda. Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors don't really even try to argue, and historically have responded by quietly swallowing up the smaller breweries like whales and minimizing them in their stomachs. They always win, and we always lose; this isn't a meritocracy, it's hegemony.
These shameless profiteers have intentionally contributed to the erosion of our faculties of discrimination, and they have succeeded both in the way we conceive of our beer, and the way we conceive of ourselves.
We are wont to describe beer—as my former roommate and I half-facetiously observe—as possessing only four characteristics: “light,” “heavy,” “bitter,” and “smooth.” No wonder so many are convinced of their distaste! In this does, in fact, lie a good indicator: if these terms are sufficient to describe a given beer, you've learned everything you need to know about it. But this set of adjectives is hardly complete; a quality beer doesn't just have a laundry list of characteristics, it has an entire dynamic landscape to be explored. A pale ale is not just a “beer with more hops,” it's a prickly frolic in a sunny, summer orchard, an India pale ale doubly so. At the other end of the spectrum lives a dance of a different kind, the stout; dark and sometimes brooding, it's a midnight ballet deep in a forest of oak, sherry, and dark chocolate. The Oktoberfestbier sings breezy notes of toffee and autumn, the nut brown of roasted malt and molasses, the golden ale of bubbly and velvet and the ballroom waltz. Our palates should have to rise to meet the imaginations of the brewers, not the other way around.
Equal dysfunction lies in the careless invention of “beer snobbery.” This notion is misleading, for there need be nothing exclusionary about it; the term “beer geek” is more precise. After all, nobody thinks the burgers served at McDonald's are as good as the ones at So Long Saloon, do they? And furthermore, does making this observation require any kind of real elitism? The subtleties begin to become more readily apparent, between different species of beers and eventually between brewers themselves. But one can never forget that Joycean epiphany; that first sip, the thoughtful emergence of that understanding.
To paraphrase: let the brewers of yellow beer tremble at a revolution. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win. BEER CONNOISSEURS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!
