Beer And Beer Drinking

luka said:

I often drink 10 pints of craft beer. It's dangerous thiugh cos they're so much stronger than lagers. Nowadays I like drinking half a pint of lager and a double Jameson's. Do that all night.

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https://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=14007

luka said:

I often drink 10 pints of craft beer.

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ooh look at Mr Moneybags here!

i think craft beers are awful. i can't wait for them to disappear again. paying 10 euro for a bit of beer that was made with some rare cat poo coffee bean? it's ridiculous and absurd, it tastes like mud whereas normal beer is refreshing, makes you say ahhhhhhh after you take a sip.

that's probably true for a lot of craft beers, but there are some great ones that aren't weirdly flavored or pretentious. plus it's good to support small business brewers instead of the global giants.

Craft beer is one of those things where i basically agree with everyone who hates it, but somehow I also actually really like it.

I guess that to some extent it's about knowing how to pick the beers / breweries / styles that I'm actually likely going to enjoy. A lot of the stuff that's most hyped at the moment isn't really to my tastes, so if I just bought stuff at random then I'd probably waste a lot of money on stuff that I don't actually like.

Just down to taste more than anything else. Most strong lager tastes like sugary shit to me now that only had the high booze content as it's "selling point". Craft beer is often fucking lush, by comparison. The hipster site of it is irritating and ofc it's a bourgeois commodity but so is pretty much ever other nice thing in existence.

Yeah that's v true.

I never know what to order in an English pub. if I'm not in a craft beer place, what should I be drinking? give me some recommendations on what to get at a wetherspoons.

You can get some decent stuff at wetherspoons, though it might be in bottles. They usually have fairly good ipas. Definitely far from the worst pubs, and sometimes much much better than that. Just dont ask for a baltic porter

you can order the mumford and sons ipa maybe? :crylarf:

“I would say that the angriest critiques I get from people about shows are when I’m drinking whatever convenient cold beer is available in a particular place, and not drinking the best beer out there. You know, I haven’t made the effort to walk down the street 10 blocks to the microbrewery where they’re making some fucking Mumford and Sons IPA. People get all bent about it. But look, I like cold beer. And I like to have a good time. If you bring me a really good one, a good craft beer, I will enjoy it, and say so. But I’m not gonna analyse it. I was in San Francisco and I was desperate for a beer, and I walked into this place I thought it was an old bar. And I sat down and I looked up and I noticed there was a wide selection of beers I’d never heard of. Which is fine. OK, I’m in some sort of brew pub. What’s good? But I looked around: the entire place was filled with people sitting there with five small glasses in front of them, filled with different beers, taking notes. This is not a bar. This is fucking Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This is wrong. This is not what a bar is about. A bar is to go to to get a little bit buzzed, and pleasantly derange the senses, and have a good time and interact with other people or make bad decisions or feel bad about your life. It’s not to sit there fucking analysing beer. It’s antithetical.”

I don't take notes, but I'm not beyond 'tastings' on occasion. A la the Pepsi sip test, flight tasting favour sip beers over gulp beers - some beers need 4cl at least to really get to know them.

But the thing is, tasting lots of different beers will actually get you drunk quicker.

Re: wetherspoons - the guest cask ales are mostly a bit meh, but they sometimes have something good on. I think it does matter who's running the place as some give a shit more than others. If it's got a Cask Marque certification is probably a tell. Otherwise the cans/bottles are probably the safest best if you like the IPA style - Bengali is very fruity but very decent. Though Punk is usually on tap and included in the meal deals if an actual pint is what you want - it's known for being a bit inconsistent but it's not going to be terrible.

why do most 'ordinary' pubs still have no dark beer available on tap? I went to supposedly the 'best' pub in Birmingham the other night (it's actually about the 25th best of even the ones I've been to - I can only presume some bizarre bourgeois fetish is at work in this designation), and there were 16 taps and almost nothing but lager and ipa...wtf

Basically it's the obvious answer. Large proportions of British people - including people who are "into beer" - won't buy dark beer under any circumstances, so it doesn't sell.

I've never understood why this is - like, do these people not like coffee or chocolate, and how come Guinness is so popular - but there it is.

TBH if there's one widely applicable thing that I've got from being geeky about beer and beer culture, it's a visceral feel for how little peoples' buying patterns have to do with the objective properties of the things that they're buying.

Yeah, I say that often with food and restaurants, so it makes sense that it applies to drink too. So many mediocre restaurants are the subject of insane amounts of praise.

It is quite perplexing, given the quality of much of the stout and porter available nowadays. And of course Guinness is just about the least impressive of stouts (tho the West Indian porter is decent)

This is wild speculation, but if you're a bar you want people to take that 'third pint' and I'm guessing there's BI or whatever to suggest that this is less likely when someone consumes a dark beer.