Beer Is A Continuum (or The Bell-Curve of Style vs Consumption)

I wasn't born in a mash tun. I wasn't bottle-fed wort when I was a nipper. I've learned to love beer, the same as everyone else, although I did it back-to-front compared to most. I cut my teeth on real ale, and didn't drink lager for the first 10 years of my drinking career. There are some styles I still struggle with, and although I may acquire a taste for them later in life, being in my 40s makes that unlikely. There are some styles that I've grown bored with - I still LIKE huge barrel-aged beers occasionally, but these form a tiny part of my drinking repertoire these days.

For everyone immersed in the beer world - and readers of this blog are mostly that, rather than casual passing traffic - there is a particular segment of the market that we like to drink. Chris Mair touches on that in this post, so there's no need for me to reiterate it. I agree with his sentiments. And as I'm sure I've said before, there is a tendency for any group centred around a communal interest - food, technology, lifestyle - to assume that they are the peak of sophistication for any given phenomenon. It's called having an opinion, and it's a human trait.

But one thing that I'm really keen to stress is that we're in a niche. If the world of beer is a pint, we're probably no more than the head on it, if that. And at the risk of being branded again as "cheery-beery", someone is drinking all of that other beer and enjoying it. You can take the view that all that beer is being drunk for want of an informed alternative, and in my experience this is true in about half of the cases. Most people don't have the information and experience available to them to make the leap to something difference. That's my experience from 10 years of retailing, and I was unsurprised to see Young Dredge reflecting that in a recent post. 

OK, I'm rambling a bit. What prompted this train of thought was the comment on my previous blog about Mikkeller Not Just Another Wit being a witbier with "everything turned up to 11". It prompted a response from Jon at Stringers asking if that was what we wanted in a beer.

And my response to that is, of course we do, but that's not the only thing we want. I want all the options to be available to me, all the time. I want anything from a pint of Carling or Carlsberg (I'd guess I only drink those a few times a year) to a monumental barrel-aged barley wine or tart lambic (which, equally, I only drink a few times a year). Those are my outliers which frame the bell curve of my consumption. The existence of those outliers doesn't threaten what's in the middle. And in the style of Boak & Bailey, I've prepared a graph to illustrate that idea: (EDIT: the vertical axis is volume drunk by me)

Beer: A Sense of Place

I'm not really one for labelling or cataloging beer, and I'm certainly not a style slave, but when you drink beer, it's nice to get a sense of where it's from, and the ethos behind it.

There was a tweet today from The Reluctant Scooper asking Is Moor JJJ IPA an IPA or a barleywine?. Normally I wouldn't get involved in this line of questioning, but (a) it's a bloody good beer and (b) when I tried it, I was surprised to be disappointed that it tasted like a really great West Coast Double IPA.

Now don't get me wrong, I love that whole USA West Coast IPA thing - it produces some of the most enjoyable beers I've ever had the pleasure to drink. But most of those have been imports, a direct link to the progenitor of a style, from a particular locality. Having a stunningly good DIPA coming from the West Country rather than the West Coast is simultaneously (a) a pleasure and (b) confusing. Yes, I know Justin is not of these isles, but still....

It's in the nature of beer that it can be brewed anywhere. If there's a brewer with enough gumption, they can make almost any style of beer, anywhere they chose. I guess the exception would be the classic Belgian lambics - they have a sense of place, and nothing really comes close to replicating the beers that are so intimately tied, of necessity, to a geographical locality. Actually, plenty of people come close (Russian River, for the win), but even thought the replicas are great, there is still a sense of ersatz rather than echt.

Still, these are the facts: Moor JJJ IPA is a great beer. It seems that no-one can really pin this beer down. I don't think these two points are mutually exclusive, unless someone can convince me otherwise.