Americans will destroy beer if we let them

I'm been meaning to write this post for some time now. About a year and half, to be more precise, dating from the moment when I first tried Sam Adams Imperial Stout. I note for the record that I am a big fan of Samuel Adams and of Jim Koch. Sam Adams Boston Lager was the beer that got me interested in drinking outside the pilsner style that had dominated North American brewing for so long, and I still think that it's a solid beer: a good example of how you can move from niche market to mass market and not totally lose your soul. Also, I think that Koch has done more than any other single person to bring interesting beer back to the American public. I don't remember ever really disliking a Samuel Adams beer with the possible exception of that cherry-flavored crap that they called a lambic, and which they now, Thank God, seem to have discontinued. So I was excited to see that they had produced these "speciality" beers, what they called the Brewmasters Collection. If their regular beers are that good, my thinking went, their speciality beers will be even better.

Well, no. The Imperial Stout, first of all, did not taste like a stout. It tasted like a watery, slightly beery flavored molasses. So bad that for perhaps the first time in my life I was tempted to toss out beer that I had paid good money for into the garbage (I didn't. I used it in recipes instead, where the food could help mask the taste). The last time I remembered hating a beer this bad was when I was at a tasting sponsored by Tulsa's resident beer expert, Elliot Nelson (owner/operator of the always-reliable McNellie's pub in the downtown portion of our city), and we were given a sample of what Nelson called "extreme beer:" which are not really defined by anything other than the desire to push the envelope. Extreme hoppy taste, or extremely high alcohol content, or extremely strange flavors (often, in the last case, inspired by beers of past ages). And then I remembered that Nelson had mentioned Koch being somewhat impressed by the whole idea of extreme beer.

So, who to blame for what I think is this extremely bad idea? Well, maybe Koch himself, who may have coined the phrase. But I think the better candidate might be one Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Brewery in Delaware and the subject of this 2008 New Yorker profile by Burkhard Bilger. Calagione seems to have been a slightly fucked-up scion of American wealth (he got kicked out of his East Coast prep school for shenanigans)--a Holden Caulfield type, a bit of a lost soul, until he discovered his true calling in his twenties: which was to screw up American craft brewing by making really, really hoppy beers. As soon as I started to read about Calagione I recalled Dogfish from my days in Philly. It was one of those beers that I wanted to enjoy but just couldn't. Everything about it was funky and cool, right down to its name and its labels. The only problem was I didn't like the actual taste of the beer. Bilger's story is mostly hagiographic, but for me, the key quote is a negative one from Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery (which makes some good beers):

"When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’"

It's important that beer, like any other sort of food, taste interesting. But actually, that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is that it taste good. Extreme beer seems to be the product of two different forces. The first is the inherent American tendency to think that bigger is better. The same attitude that gave us the Lincoln Navigator and Golden Corral has produced beer with an alcohol content upwards of 20 percent. The second is the need of the modern beer aficianado to prove cultural capital through drinking beer with "complex" or "interesting" tastes (or sometimes, "notes," as though we were describing wine.) When I was at the beer festival in Montreal earlier this summer, there were a lot of beers that were aiming for this palate: most notably, Dieu de Ciel, whose Péché Mortel has achieved international recognition. But for my money Unibroue--as much as it has turned into a corporation--still has the best of the Quebec brews. Unibroue generally follows older styles, particularly from Belgium and France, and doesn't try to get too fancy.

Innovation is not bad per se (nor, for that matter, is excess), but there's problem, I think, when we start to value these things for their own sake, rather than establishing some other, competing standard for quality. Surrender that more rigorous standard, you end up with some asshole in Scotland making beer that's 55 per cent alcohol, stuck inside a Dead Squirrel. (Why not just drink some whisky? I guarantee it will taste better than that shit.)

We can't let this happen to beer. As Belgian monks have always known, beer is too important.