Posts Tagged: Styles
What Do You Do When You Just Don't Like A Beer?
Posted by on Saturday, March 17, 2012 in - 19 comments
Sometimes it may be nothing more than personal preference but what does the dedicated beer nerd do when you don't like a classic? • I bring the glass to my nose and slowly inhale, breathing her in. The first thing I think is, “This beer smells like balsamic vinegar.” Uh oh. I can also detect …
Can Better Graphical Representation Of Data Help Beer?
Posted by on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 in - 17 comments
OK, one is about beer and one is an alien attack... but which is which? • Boak and Bailey got me thinking with this graphical representation of data. In this case it was a five point illustration of a variety of imperial stouts. You will immediately see a most interesting point being asserted …
Proposing A New Measuring Stick For Good Beer
Posted by on Monday, February 20, 2012 in - 7 comments
It came to mind when I saw that Beer Advocate moved to a numerical scale, abandoning the far superior less granular alphabetical scale of elementary school report cards. The nicest thing about the alphabetical scale is that you could appreciate that the function of measuring was not as serious as …
What If Beer Style Is A Conceptual Dead End?
Posted by on Sunday, February 19, 2012 in - 20 comments
While they may not be entirely unhelpful and avoiding the question of dubious authenticity, at what point do beer styles become so diversified as to be useless? Originally envisaged in a different and hierarchical structure, they have become a mile wide and an inch deep. They have become so finely …
Do New Beer Styles Just Reflect New Ways... And Stuff?
Posted by on Wednesday, February 8, 2012 in - 8 comments
The other day I read one of the more interesting passages of beery thought that I had read in some time. It's from a response to a post at Jeff's Beervana about the wonky less than linear history of beer styles: • While it’s entirely possible that malt bills and hopping rates of many of craft …
Can A "Style" Ever Be More Than A Helpful Generality?
Posted by on Thursday, November 24, 2011 in - 6 comments
Levels of abstraction. That is what this style stuff is about. Not about what it is but how it can be grouped. I think. Two articles got me thinking about this today. In The New York Times, Eric Asimov talked about "sour" beer and got into a range of beers that I would never consider to fall under …
Was This The Earliest Brewing In English Canada?
Posted by on Thursday, November 3, 2011 in - 24 comments
Sneath, Pashley and Rubin all mention the 1600s brewers of New France - Hebert (1617), Ambroise (1646) and Talon (1670). But I just came across this reference in a footnote in the Minutes of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1671-1674, published by Toronto's Champlain Society in 1942, describing payments …
Oh, For A Mug O' Fern Ale To Keep Strangers Away
Posted by on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 in - 9 comments
Ron got me thinking. He was making fun of something written by Horst Dornbusch today, the "man of a million unfounded claims," when I noticed something about pale ale coming into being around 1800 when coke was first used. I knew that was wrong so I started digging around for references to straw …
Global #IPAday! It's Global #IPAday!! Global #IPAday!!!
Posted by on Thursday, August 4, 2011 in - 7 comments
Global #IPAday. That's what it needs to be called. I don't like the implications of international #IPAday. It leaves out the stateless and those on ships at sea beyond territorial waters. And, really, isn't that what #IPAday is all about? Inclusion? Or is it exclusion? Who knows. Here are some …
#IPADay: When Good People Try Out New Good Things
Posted by on Friday, July 8, 2011 in - 8 comments
I am a bit of a dork sometimes. I saw these tweets floating around with the hashtag #IPADay and made some smart ass remarks on Twitter. Pure junior high. Or junior B, more like it. Well, some of them were not all that bad, now that I think of it: • Hugely uninterested in #IPADay. Waiting for …
