Garden Variety New Yorker

“Fancy” Beer for Simple Folk

Breweries, Uncategorized March 16th, 2012 by Ceetar in Beer

A friend linked me to this article on askmen.com. It reads like The Onion, and the tone is full of pretension that the author is trying to attribute to craft beer, but it’s presumably a serious post. The author misses the days when beer was simple, bland, and cold. He yearns for the days of simple working class people getting together over a couple of beers, and simply drinking them. It amuses me that he goes on and on about working class beer but goes out of his way to use ‘fancy’ words like emetics, gullet and twee.

It’s an okay sentiment, if one I don’t agree with, to enjoy, even prefer, a beverage that is quaffable, a cheap hobby, and gets you to that tipsy and relaxed state that many people enjoy whether from beer, wine, or cocktail. What’s not okay is to suggest that his preference is both the real way to enjoy beer, and that it’s secretly what I want as well. The idea that craft beer drinkers are hipsters drinking the beer solely to make a statement and stand out is not a new one, but it’s been steadily disproven with the growing market of not only craft beer, but of homebrewing. There are lots of people out there making strange tasting beers in their own basements and consuming them themselves with no regard to what’s popular or trendy. Many people have different taste buds, and enjoy the different tastes beer offers beyond a vaguely malty cold beverage. One of the great things about beer is how many different types there are.

The writer of this article, one Patrick Smith, makes himself out to be the archetypal character in a marketing commercial. He admits to being influenced by beer commercials well before being of legal age, he repeats the common marketed point of beer being better as cold as possible,and he recites commercial taglines and insinuates that he believes them that it makes him cool to drink those beers. Personally I think he’s stuck in a 1970s view of what’s manly. I think, and maybe we’re not all keen with the labels in today’s society, the typical manly man in today’s world is different than it was then, and they drink craft beer, but that’s a discussion that deserves it’s own post.

The more I think about it, what Mr. Smith is really missing is a time when he could be a “functional alcoholic” and be praised as a man for it. Luckily we’ve progressed to a point where we recognize the desire to drink heavily after work, at ballgames, as a child, or at every gathering of men as symptoms of alcoholism.

Tags: appreciating beer, askmen, beer drinking, craft beer, fancy beer, homebrew, real men, real men drink craft beer

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