Last night I was in my local generic grocery store (Yo, what’s happening Save Mart!?), doing my generic shopping for the next couple days. And I needed beer.
I went through the standard section that is 75% Big Beer and the rest Craft Beer. There was nothing interesting to me in the Craft. So I went to the one end-cooler where they have more specialty craft beers.
Sadly, all the interesting ale-based stuff carried a date of four months or older, making it unusable to me.
As I was about to give up and get a six-pack of Sierra, I noticed a new-to-me eight-pack of beer from San Diego’s Belching Beaver. It is a mixed pack of their Deftones beers.
Sweet! This is exactly what I need at this moment. BUT, no date on the box and you can’t see the can dates. Since the rest on the cooler has older beer, it is pretty likely this is old too. But I want it.
Fuck it. I buy it.
I wait till I get home to see if I just wasted $20 on old beer. And when I do, to my surprise, none of the beers are more than five weeks old.
A rare score. I can’t imagine I’ll get so lucky next time.
He is talking about how if Allagash White (considered by Beer Twitter to be a perfect beer) can be rated so low by Untappd, then something is wrong with Untappd.
Yes but if you are Untappd, HOW can you weight by style?
I think everyone knows “not my style” guy is a problem in Untappd, but how in the world could you actually remove that guy’s rating? How do you fix that in reality without someone at Untappd picking through every rating and messing with it?
I don’t think you can.
One of the ticks of Untappd is it’s what the world of drinkers thinks of a beer, not just what uppity beer geeks think.
Maybe you can try, like others have, to create a more curated, “educated” beer drinker app and not let anyone rate Allagash White below a five. Good luck with your boring-ass beer app.
And also, us beer geeks aren’t perfect either:
Selection bias is always a problem, to be sure. And data always needs context. But usually the folks complaining want to be the arbitrators of "good", and bias exists just as much (or more) in those groups as well
I guess it would be nice to have a more accurate rating system. But I feel like you lose something if you’re tweaking things and walling off all non-snobs.
So I think Allagash White deserves that 3.76. It’s rated too low by drinkers that don’t know Belgian Wit and overly hyped by Allagash fans, making for a perfect real world rating.
BTW, Wheat beers and Belgian Witbier, like Allagash White? Well, they suck. Not my style.
My first thought was: Keep drinking it. But there are better thoughts on the subject.
Here is the best of Beer Twitter’s advice:
This is a great place to start. We talk about it on the Perfect Pour; reset your palate.
I occasionally buy a 12-pack of an old favorite, Sierra Nevada Pale, and that usually makes things all freakin’ right.
Can’t go wrong supporting good people making good things.
That one falls under the resetting your palate umbrella and I’m for it.
Okie dokie:
Get your beers cold and watch some videos may be all ya need.
I will NOT endorse the wine tactic but I do endorse taking a break from beer if things are getting that bad. I probably should do this but simply don’t want to.
Oh HELL yes! ? Finding some hidden gem of a brewery in a new city. That will pump ya back up.
Yes yes yes ?. Which reminds me, I really want to put some charcuterie boards together themed for beer pairing and have a party and shit. We should ALL do this.
Nope nope nope. We done here. Chris, we are trying to fall BACK in love with beer, not block it from our feed.
How To Fall In Love With Beer Again [a recap]:
Drink some of your old favorite beers. Spend some time doing it.
Reset your palate. Drink stuff you never would normally drink. Weird styles. Even drink BAD beer.
Enjoy the good people around beer. Don’t overthink what you are drinking.
Watch other people enjoying beer. Brew some beer on your own.
Take a break. Simply don’t drink a damn thing for a while.
Focus on having the right beer with your food and go down a charcuterie cutting board hole.
If you have your own thoughts or advice on this, please leave it in the comments. And if you like pickles and olives on your charcuterie board, I think I’m falling in love with you.
Now let’s look at this board and think about the beers we want to have with it:
Sadly, Modern Times Brewing had a couple of sucky announcements this week. One is they are having to furlough a large part of the workforce. Second is, two of their employees tested positive for COVID-19. They don’t work in any of the taprooms, but still.
This is the first I have heard of a major indie brewery having employees test positive. Actually, it’s the first time I have heard of ANY brewery have employees test positive. This makes me think breweries are just underreporting or I’m not paying attention. Both are probably true.
I was listening to a recent episode of Trader’s Joe’s podcast Inside Trader Joe’s and they revealed that they have a Cookie Butter dessert beer in the works. It is expected to be out around September. My only thought was “What the hell took so long?”
If you want to listen, it’s Episode 27.
There is an incredibly long article/blog post at Beer Crunchers sort of about DontDrinkBeer and the amazing amount of beer (and money from raffling off the beer), he has been able to collect for charity. The charity being money to the family of Breonna Taylor and the family of Elijah McClain. He was able to raise almost $68,000. There is also a Kate Bernot article about it.
I love what he did here with his following. He must have a pretty amazing reputation with the craft brewery world too because an insane amount of folks donated beer. Incredible good use of his influence. Big cheers to this.
So this is pretty rad. Victim Of Maths unearthed a map of Great Britan but with only pubs highlighted:
London and Liverpool look insane. One of my travel dreams is to go to Ireland or anywhere in the UK really, and have some beers at legit pubs. Goals.
I love sitting. Drinking. Thinking. Listening to music while doing this is also nice. So I have been meaning to create a Spotify playlist designed for just this. In the meantime, I found one @beer_pop did that you can check out too.
One highlight is “Oblivious” from The Strokes and… well, actually there are too many to highlight, it’s a pretty damn extensive playlist. It’s going to take a lot of drinking and thinking to get through it all. I’m here for that.
Okay cool, I’m Mikey Seay and I hope you enjoyed issue #8 of Drinking & Thinking! The goal is to have issues in your inbox every other Saturday, working to a goal of every Saturday.
If this is your first time reading, please considering subscribing.
Oh, and I have started a Ko-fi page if you want to check it out. I’m starting to figure out that having money to buy beer is pretty cool.
