Im in a slightly snotty irritable mood tonight. Long week I suppose. But I thought it could be fun to vent some beer or brewing pet peeves, if it doesnt go off the rails. So vent nicely please.
Acetaldehyde: there is only one “al” in there. ASS-ET-AL-DE-HIDE, not ASS-EAT-ALL-AL-DE-HIDE!
I’ll leave it at just one for now so I dont hog all the good ones…
The idea that rarity/scarcity makes it a good beer. Standing in line for hours to get a taste of some rare beer. Lots of them are very good but just because production is small doesn’t make it better.
Peat smoked malt in Scottish… caveat, I have not had a actual fresh from Scotland scotish beer. But ive heard that Scottish beer is smokey from peat smoked malt. Plus its in the guidelines so it must be so.
From what ive gathered, there are a couple breweries in France that use peat smoked malt because they think it gives the beer a scotch flavor. But the story spreads. Now its expected that Scottish ale has smoke. When its pointed out that they actually dont use it, the lore spreads to the yeast throwing a smoke ester… or maybe its from roasted grain, or maybe this or that. Maybe they actually dont have any smoke charater at all. Apparently its near impossible to kill some myths. Like Guiness putting rotten beer in their batches to get that sour flavor. Maybe its just dry? No sour beer, or road kill added.
One day ill have to go to the UK if for no other reason but to taste these fresh and see for myself.
Littering! Think that doesn’t relate to beer and brewing? Most of the cans I pick up are light beer cans. Bud Light the clear winner although recently there has beena surge of Coors light bottles. A$$H0LES!
+1. Around here it’s keystone or blue mountains (same same) only people from Montana drink bud light.
Agreed!
I’m getting real tired of certain non-beer friends harassing me about why I don’t wait/pay for Westy 12, Dark Lord, etc, etc, etc. Fun fact: I have 50 gallons of borderline excellent beer in my basement that I made for less than I would pay for eight Westy 12s. I don’t think I need the trouble! ;D
One more of my own: I was at a work conference over the weekend. I declined to drink whatever beer it was in a green bottle. A man came up to me, described himself as a ‘beer guy’, and then asked why I wouldn’t drink the green-bottled beer. I told him that I did not enjoy skunked beer. He looked at me funny and asked what I meant. I told him, “When beer is packaged in green bottles it is not protected from UV light, which degrades the iso-alpha acids in the beer into an unpleasant aroma that smells like a skunk. So I’d rather have a different beer.” He told me that was and interesting theory, chuckled, and then started rambling about how he loved Yuengling - which was packaged in a green bottle. :
Nothing much you can do there.
Inexplicable fanboyism. Mentioned yuengling, another is shiner.
Edit - forgot to list Abita.
+1 to all of these. I bought ( and overpaid) for Westy12. It’s great, and also no better than Rochefort10 or St Bernardus12 . Same goes for Dark Lord and other stouts. Pliny is great fresh, and not much better (if any) IMO than a few other breweries’ IPAs. And Yuengling speaks for itself, if not very strongly. Fanboy sites suck. Wow…feel better. 
People want stuff that’s hard to get, and they want to be the first to get it, and they want to overpay. If the best beer was 50 cents a can and available in every country, it would be scoffed as Crap!
To segue two peeves, if bud could not be sold outside of st Lois and every ditch had an empty cantillion bottle laying in it…
I hate it when I give non-craft beer drinkers some homebrew and they say, “You made that? Did you make it in the bathtub?” My reply is usually, “I did make that. I hope the soap I used doesn’t make it taste funny.” And then I have to try and explain my brewing process to someone that doesn’t have any idea what I am talking about, but I feel it is better to educate the non-educated and move on.
The seemingly inverse relationship between the willingness of beer snobs on certain beer-related websites to pontificate and their knowledge about the subjects upon which they pontificate.
And I’m speechless, I really thought it was spelled acetylaldehyde!
My MO at beer festivals is to go with the shortest lines. I really don’t care what awesome beer is being tapped, this unknown brewery’s hefeweizen will do just fine.
hey. i am moving to montana, or maybe vancouver washington. still trying to decide. gotsta get out of illinois
Go for Vancouver. Portland has a great beer scene.
Yes! Or the scourge of the urban American Landscape. The spent cigarette butt.
What the he!! makes people think it’s OK to just toss those out ANYWHERE and EVERYWHERE?
Take a look down on your next walk around and it’ll piss you right off.
When I was 16, and a seasonal worker at a state park, it was my job to pick up every cigarette butt in every parking lot and picnick area. It was awful. I also developed a strong hatred for fisherman who couldn’t throw anything into a garbage can, except fish they didn’t want. Yeah, there was a lot of bmc cans floating around.
I don’t like spices or fruit in most beers. If I want the taste of fruit in beer I’ll add a few drops of blackberry or maybe raspberry in a light style of beer like Wheat or Blonde Ale. I’m kind of a purist in that way. If I want spice I eat cookies or a piece of apple pie with a dark beer. Exceptions to this are beers like Saisons, I don’t mind some fruit or spice in these because the Belgian funk seem to go well with these flavors. And as Major and Micsager said littering. I live in the Midwest and it’s pretty dry right now. The highway I live on has burned areas along the road from dumb asses throwing their cigarettes out the window. ONLY TRASH LITTERS! bumper sticker I seen a while back says it all.
On the subject of fruit…my pet peeve is ordering a pint of beer, and getting a slice of fruit on the glass. Lemon for weissbier, orange for wit. Ask me if I want the fruit, so I can say “no”.
My peeve is restaurants that have a beer list that reads: "Light lager, Light lager, Light lager, Light lager, Light lager, Light lager, Blue Moon.
They think they have a good selection for beer drinkers. I frequently point out that they are all the basically same style, and I just get that look, coupled with silence.
False pints. Pint is a unit of measure, not a shape. If a place calls it a pint, I expect a pint.