When it comes to the question of whether one beer can really be said to be better than another, most people will take the view that there’s no fact of the matter there, whether one beer is better than another is purely a matter of preference and when it comes to matters of quality and taste there can be no legitimate dispute. When it comes to beer we tend to accept something like beer relativism: the claim that the quality of a beer is relative to the taste of individuals at particular times and places. As we have seen from the previous post in this series, I think beer relativism is false. We can give reasons as to why some beers are better than others, reasons that should be persuasive. Of course I can’t reason your taste-buds into liking a beer, but I can at least try to persuade you to concede that even though you may not like an individual beer, there are facts of the matter when it comes to quality and authenticity such that if you value them then, given that there is a fact of the matter as to which beers possess those traits and which ones do not, you should prefer the beers that possess those traits over those that don’t. Of course, if you don’t value the quality of the ingredients that go into a beer and you don’t value an authentic brewing process and the history that has shaped each particular brewing style then there’s no much one can do in terms of argument. I can’t convince or force you to value quality, but that’s alright, because most people would at least claim to value it, and this argument will take the form of a conditional that if you value certain things, then you ought to value the beers that possess the things you’ve claimed to value over those that don’t. That’s the strategy anyway.

In the first post of this series we considered the question of whether there can be any fact of the matter about the quality of a beer. Can some beers really be said to be good or bad independently of our mere taste for them? We saw that there is a fact of the matter as to what properties a good beer cannot have. For example, a good beer cannot be a beer that poisons its drinkers. If we can establish some prima facie intuitive qualities a beer cannot have then we’ll have gone a long way into showing why absolute beer relativism cannot be right.

What about relational properties? How might we go about showing that some beers can be said to be better than others? We might already be used to making such claims, but by “this beer is better than that one” we tend to mean “I like this one better than that one”. What I’m interested in is the question of whether one can point to certain qualities in a beer that will allow us to say “this is better than that” in a way that would compel most rational individuals to agree with us. I think we can make some headway here.

Think of how we reason when it comes to other domains. We all seem to agree that a legitimate Apple iPhone is better than a cheap Chinese knockoff. The cheap Chinese knockoff uses inferior plastics, inferior electronics, and inferior software. Moreover, the word “inferior” here isn’t mere preference, whether one metal is better than another at conducting electricity is made true in virtue of natural laws. That silver is better at conducting electricity than nichrome is not a matter of opinion but a matter of scientific fact. So, if we want to make an electric product with good conductivity we should use silver rather than nichrome. What makes the quality of one material superior to another is a matter of what we want and design it for and a matter of natural law. Similarly then, there is a fact of the matter in quality when it comes to beer ingredients. None of us would dispute that a rotten fruit is inferior to a fresh one. Similarly, fresh healthy hops are superior than hops that have been infected with Downy Mildew. Hops play a specific role in beer by balancing their sweetness and imparting oils that give it a particular body and aroma, as well as preventing spoilage and contributing to head retention. And once again, some hops do these better than others. Given what they’re used for, it is an empirical fact as to which ones fulfill their roles more efficiently than other varieties. Cheap knock-offs are inferior products because they use inferior materials that produce sub-par performance and fail to perform their intended function as well as their legitimate counterparts. Clearly there’s a fact of the matter as to why an authentic Apple iPhone is better than one of these.

But then consider an Anheuser-Busch “Porter” to, say, a Stone Smoked Porter. Usually Porters get their color through the natural process of the ingredients reacting with brewing process:

Porters and, thus, stouts first took their color from a combination of highly roasted brown malt and amber malt — in England, brown malt from Hertfordshire became relatively inexpensive after newly carved shipping canals made it easy to transport. That brown malt, also known as “snap,” provided a charred quality. Today, stout’s signature roasty flavors and dark color come instead from unmalted barley that is roasted much like coffee beans are. (via Stout Beers)

Now consider the fact that an Anheuser-Busch “porter” uses food coloring to achieve its dark looks. Why is this a problem? Because of its artificiality.

When it comes to many things that we consume, the expected provenance can be the critical attribute at hand. Artificial flavors and artificial colors are artificial precisely because we might reasonably have expected a different provenance. Red is red- there is no such thing as “artificial red.” What there is, however, is “artificial redness,” a red color derived from an unexpected source. If a lollipop is bright red and tastes of cherries, we might expect that its redness came from cherries and so did its flavors. Of course, we would rarely be correct. For this reason, consumer protection law seeks to protect us from subterfuges by making the manufacturer of the lollipop tell us that all is not what it seems (Garrett Oliver, The Beer Matrix, p. 34).

In the U.S., however, brewers aren’t required to provide primary ingredients in their labeling. Consider next the fact that the amount of ingredients in Busch Porter is far less than in the Stone Porter, and the fact that the ingredients used in the making of the beer are far inferior. Because breweries aren’t required to provide their primary ingredient information we can only infer how much of these ingredients go into each bottle of beer indirectly (see: Quality, Schmality: Talking Naturally about the Aesthetics of Beer; or, Why is American Beer So Lousy? in Beer & Philosophy). Instead of using the natural juices of the fruits or beans, companies like Anheiser Busch will use cheap syrupy extracts in their place. Now, isn’t this analogous to the electronics case? Isn’t Anheiser-Busch simply making a cheap knockoff of the real thing? When you use inferior ingredients and engage in practices designed to make your product look like the real thing (in this sense food coloring being analogous to copying the iPhone shell design), aren’t you simply making a facsimile of the genuine article? And therefore, if we’re comfortable saying that a cheap Chinese knockoff is inferior to the genuine article, isn’t there also a fact of the matter when it comes to saying that a genuine Porter is simply better than something made to copy it, and unsuccessfully at that? The Stone Porter uses superior ingredients and possesses a certain authenticity in the brewing process that make it a good beer of its kind in a way that cheap Porter-like drinks like Anheuser-Busch’s simply can’t match.

To conclude, if you value quality and if value authenticity then you ought to see that beers like Stone’s Smoked Porter possess these qualities, unlike an Anheuser-Busch Porter. As a Porter, Stone’s offering possesses qualities that the cheap knockoff lacks, and so in a non-trivial way we can confidently say that Stone produces a better product. When it comes to matters of taste we can give reasons as to why some things like certain beers are better than others. Reasons that we all seem to already accept in other domains; unless there’s a structural disanalogy between the two domains we are justified in holding that there are facts of the matter we can point to in order to resolve aesthetic disputes.

Notice that this isn’t full blown objectivism about matters of aesthetics. I can’t force you or convince you to value things like authenticity and quality, I can only assume that you already do and proceed from there. Since I know of no way to convince you that those are things you ought to value, I concede that there is a certain element of subjectivity in these kinds of aesthetic disputes, but it isn’t full blown relativism either. I simply opt to call it quasi-realism, borrowing from Simon Blackburn’s unrelated but useful name.