I know folks enter competitions and there’s some validation there, don’t get me wrong. But the other day I had a friend of mine who thinks “dark beer” is anything darker than a pils. His mind was made up that dark beers taste bad, and are too heavy - he didn’t like them at all.
After drinking my O’Fest beer for the first time last saturday, he stated he couldn’t believe how smooth and easy drinking it was. He said he had never been able to drink “dark beer”.
4 -1/2 liters later, I had converted him to craft beer several shades darker than pils!
That’s a gold medal and great satisfaction achieved in my book.
People sure do consider dark beer “heavy” even though it is usually not. The funny thing is that often their only dark beer they have tried is Guinness, which is not heavy at all. I guess their definition of “heavy” is “contains flavor”.
Anyway, good job Ken.
Both of these. Even as a craft beer drinker, there’s nothing that’ll turn me off faster from an amber or a brown ale than being unbalanced in the amount of crystal in it.
I just try to gauge it by how people are drinking. If someone taps a beer here and it takes them 45 minutes to drink it, I assume they’re not into it. I don’t really want people to choke it down if they don’t like it. That said, I don’t put beers on tap that I think are not up to my standards. If the beer has a flaw, I don’t want people experiencing that. Most of my beers are very drinkable and geared towards the people who are going to be drinking them. When I see people returning to the taps and really enjoying the beer (and kegs are being emptied), that’s a compliment.
Awesome. That’s where the satisfaction is in brewing, when someone genuinely thinks your beer is good. I feel like a lot of people will say they like it just out of being nice, and I am also guilty of this. I really need to stop doing that and I always feel ashamed of myself when I do. I’d rather have someone be honest and tell me what they’re getting that they don’t like than just say it’s good to make me feel good. That’s why I feel crappy about doing it…
Does this happen with other homebrewers? I have had other homebrewers tell me to “be brutally honest” and in some cases I have been. In other cases I have not been. After I told one brewer that I detected flaws, he said, “You know, now that you’ve said it, I taste that too!” which was a relief. But another guy I know must ferment all of his beers in the 90s or something because they’re very estery and just not very good and I just take a small amount, wolf it and say, “Oh yeah, that’s good”… and then I move onto something else. I think regular “beer-drinkers” will just be polite if they don’t like it so you can’t go by that. You can only really go by it if they appear to truly be enjoying the beer. My SIL is also into “pale beers” in general. She was over once and tapped some of my “Mexican Dark Lager” and I was surprised. She kept saying, “This is REALLY good”. She would finish her glass before I finished mine and she would be looking at me like, “Can you hurry up and then go get me another beer?”. I don’t think she would fake that.
not at all exaggerating when i tell you i’ve watched people drink commercial diacetyl bomb beers and say "mmmm, buttery " and “i love this”. i want to puke, but I refrain from dogging them. same goes for home brew. if a brewer asks me for feedback and really wants it, I will give it freely. But some are happy as pigs in sh*t with what i consider flawed beer…and so again, I refrain. think you have to consider your audience, and their desire to receive what you have to offer.
Yeah, I feel the same. I only serve beers I’m happy with (not afraid to dump), and it’s usually a good sign if they’re going back for a refill fairly quickly.
It also has to do with having taps on the wall of your bar. 20-something-year-old kids will be all “YEAH BABY!” because they’re tapping beer (they’ll take a selfie tapping a beer) so enthusiasm may not really be what it seems. If they get over the fact that they’re tapping draft beer that way and they get down to what it is that they’re drinking… that’s when it gets good.
For awhile I heard people say to give certain beers extra time and they may improve and that can be good advice in some cases. But if I have a keg of beer that gets tapped and I notice a character that is just not right and I know it won’t improve, it gets drained. It’s just taking up valuable space in one of your kegs which could be used for a better beer in the pipeline. It used to make me a little nauseous to pour out a keg but it’s usually the best thing to do.
I put them all on tap. I have five taps. But, with that said, you can tell the beers that are good by the ones that your friends go back to for a second or third–or more likely too many to count. I haven’t poured a beer down the drain in years because I’d rather drink them than pour them out. My friends are more choosy than I am.
However, I’ve had so many BMC drinking friends over the past few years start out drinking my kolsch and graduate very quickly to a variety of darker, stronger, and better tasting beers that I can barely keep up brewing enough to keep the taps flowing. Be careful what you wish for; before you know it you’ll have more friends than you know what to do with. But, it’s a good problem to have–too many friends, that is.
And I think our minds trick us Pete…dark somehow equates to heavy, strong, whatever…close their eyes and have them sip a beer without seeing the color -results will change dramatically I think.
I love it when folks pour a pint of my home brew, look at it kinda like a hog lookin at a wristwatch, then take a sip, smack on it a minute, takin a gulp and saying something like, “Hey, that’s pretty good!” I just grin and say thanks. That’s a great feeling. …except when they drink it all.
BTW, yrs ago I was one of those folks who was “scared” of “dark beer” aka stouts. I’ve since been educated. As I write this I am enjoying a Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. It’s delicious!
I have been brewing since the early nineties, and I can honestly say that there is as much if not more miserable beer being brewed today as there was during that point in time.
Lots of folks feel that way but often have an “aha” moment (no pun unintended ;D) when they taste the right ‘dark’ beer.
When I was in college in Iowa in the beginning of the 1970s, my beloved IPA was not distributed in that state, so I pestered the local grocery store manager into ordering a supply of Pabst Bock…and that beer became my preferred alternative (when it was available) to the Bud, Hamm’s, and Grain Belt that everyone was drinking. Whenever I offered some of the bock to my friends they refused, and I was looked upon as crazy (in all fairness and in retrospect, that characterization wold be hard to deny). I usually got the common “they only make when they clean out the barrels every year” comment.
My favorite though was when I offered it to a collegemate in the agricultural department, and he offered the following very poetic observation: “How can you drink that? Don’t you know that stuff will give you the shits??” :o
On occasion I am in a conversation something like this.
Random home brewer: “What do you think?”
Me: “You want the truth?”
at this point if I get a one word answer like ya, or sure, I give a kind but equally short answer like “Its good.” Good being not completely undrinkable
if they give a longer answer like Ya, please, tear it apart, I want to learn… well, I give a more thorough answer and turn it into a discussion.
