Sunday 29 April 2012

@ooa09 - My Top Ten Beers

A Mr Olusola Adebusuyi tweeted me the other day asking me about what my favourite beers were, first the top three, then after I protested that was impossible, the top ten. I didn't respond at the time, because I couldn't properly formulate an answer, and a few days later, I still can't get close to starting a list.

How hard can it be to have a list of your favourite beers to hand? Why am I struggling with this apparently simple task? Surely you just start with whatever beer is your current obsession (for me, Magic Rock High Wire, on cask for preference) and work backwards from there? There is obviously going to be a of a primacy effect - whatever you've drunk most recently will be fresh in your mind, so maybe Moor Amoor (formerly Peat Porter) would make the list, not only for being a great beer, but also for defying my expectations of it - I'd foolishly been looking at the bottle for a month, worrying that a sub-5%abv porter wouldn't deliver the sort of flavour hit I was looking for, but it did, admirably. But was it better than Anchor Porter, or did I like it more? I simply can't tell you. It's just different. Why do I have to choose?

Maybe if I started scoring beers, I'd be able to formulate a list eventually. But to do this would be to sacrifice the multi-dimensional map that each beer creates in my head with its aroma, flavour and aftertaste. There's no real way of recording those sensations, other than with recourse to detailed and florid prose, or an elaborate contemporary dance. I would find that the dance routines elicited by Hook Norton's Old Hooky and Sierra Nevada's Ruthless Rye IPA are pretty similar, but one would be a more energetic version of the other. Both of these beers are about balance, and each mouthful conjures a little vignette about the balance between malt and hops with each mouthful, albeit in different accents. But do I prefer one over the other? No. And do I like them more or less than the singular hop character of Mikkeller's Single Hop Simcoe IPA? I'm not entirely sure, now I think about it.

Poking around in the cellar, looking for a nightcap, I see the iconic red and white label of a bottle of Duvel. My heart leaps momentarily, only to sink when I find that it's an empty bottle that has found its way back onto the shelf. The distance between that peak of excitement and the trough of disappointment is an unusual index of how much I like that beer, both the beer itself, and that bottle in particular.

And of course, scoring beers creates an illusion of objectivity. If, for example, I was asked to generate a numerical score for Cantillon St Lamvinus, the numbers that come out at the end would be pretty large, but it  wouldn't convey the fact that I don't like any of Cantillon's beers very much. I can't score the beer down simply because I don't like it, but neither can I feel comfortable about giving a high mark to a beer that I just don't like - my ego prevents that, I guess. I like plenty of other wild/spontaneously fermented beers - Oude Beersel, Girardin, Russian River, obvs - but like these beers, I want to be able to feel the complexity in the beer and express that in a way that impossible with number.

Beer is a personal thing. It's subjective, and most importantly, it's a continuum, from volume-produced beers at one end, to impossibly rare one-off batches at the other. Everywhere on this continuum has good and bad examples of what is on offer, and your opinion of what is good and bad is different to mine. Part of the fun of what we do - we beer drinkers, we beer writers, we beer bloggers, we brewers, we homebrewers - is to dip into the different points on that continuum. For me, it's about that journey - I'm not trying to find the ten best beers, I'm just loving the endless variety that the journey offers me.

13 comments:

  1. That's quite odd. I've just been referred here by Alan McLeod after writing a blog post for Session 63. It is also about favourite beers. It is also about Hook Norton Old Hooky.

    I am baffled.

    http://saintjohnswort.ca/2012/04/29/session-63-the-beer-moment/

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    1. It's not really that surprising. Old Hooky is one of those classics that gets overlooked by everyone, and perhaps one's expectations are also lowered by familiarity. A few weeks ago, I drank a bottle of Sam Smith India Ale immediately after a Thornbridge Jaipur. What immediately struck me was how full-bodied and bitter the Smith's beer was in comparison with Jaipur. That said, I'd struggle to say which was better, or even which I preferred - and I'm not sure why I would have to.

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  2. Lists are useful in revealing the biases of the list-maker. The problem with a best beers list is that it's too finite a product given the infinite possibilities. In other words, you can't really tell anything about a person who says he likes Orval.

    A parlor game I've invented is more instructive: left on an island for all eternity, which five styles of beer would you take? Now, leaving aside debates about whether styles even exist or not, and one's instant desire to cheat by saying lager, ale, and soured beers, the game is designed to force you to reveal your preferences. That can tell someone else a lot about you.

    Sadly, no one has ever identified brown ales. Poor brown ales.

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    1. I think you're right, Jeff, and that brings me on to another idea - to list the 5 beers that you are most ambivalent about drinking again.

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  3. We just hope no-one is keeping tabs on the number of beers we've declared as 'definitely in our top ten'...

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    1. I forget who said "my top ten has about fifty beers in it" - it might've been Ben McFarland

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    2. that would require so much research as to qualify as a phD...

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  4. Mr Adebusuyi, like all of us, simply wants to neck "Avery Approved" grog. I consider all the ones in your book "Avery Approved" along with that grog you knocked up with Dredgie.

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  5. Really enjoyed this post, I also find it difficult to score beers because I find them so much more three dimensional than numbers on a piece of paper. Sites like Rate Beer and Beer Advocate have never held much appeal for me, that said I probably do have a top ten list of beers but it won't be more than a week before it's out of date.

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  6. I have a limited memory, which makes top 10 lists difficult. I try a beer, love it, rememeber its name until I drink 20 or so more beers and the beloved beer is bumped into the ether. The beauty of this is that I get to try that beer again at some point and love it all over again. The downside is that I also waste good money, several times over, on beers I regarded as cack the first time. I'd refer to my notebook, but I put it down somewhere?

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  7. One of the great things about beer blogging is that it keeps track of the beers I drink and pretty much what I think of them. So if I come across a beer that I'm not sure if I had it before or not, I can search the blog and find out. It's more than likely in there and if it's not, but I still had it before, at least I don't remember it so it's a new experience for me, be that bad or good.

    I could not give a top 10 list either. For one thing, some of the beers I would want to put in the top 10 are so hard for me to get hold of (not imported here) that I have only ever had them a few times and if they were available easily I might not bother putting them on the list.

    I could certainly try and give a current top 10. Beers that I have had in the last year that are fresh in my mind but not an overall top ten.

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  8. Good post, well articulated. Just one small pedantic point. The Primacy Effect is not remembering what you drank last - it's what you drank first. It's the tendancy of the mind to remember what it hears first in a sequence, whether it be numbers or dates or information.

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    1. Forgot to say - it's called the recency effect...!

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Sorry about the word verification - the blog was getting spammed to bits.