It’s a lovely July day for a rant, don’t you think?
One thing I’ve always tried to do with consistency is to advocate for my segment, which for more than 40 years has been the wider and better world of beer.
As this pertains to bar and restaurant beer offerings, my position remains that beer is subject to the same patterns of thought and planning typically deployed to create balanced, representative wine and spirits selections for consumption on the premises.
There’ll be chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. Vodka and bourbon. A choice of flavors and characteristics, light to heavy, neutral to bold, down the line. A well-chosen wine list might have as few as six choices, yet still offers defined options and flexibility.
I’ve always understood differences in context and intent. Consequently I’m indifferent to an everyday tavern in the middle of nowhere that stocks only those insipid mass-market beer brands that I’ve been avoiding since the 1980s. That’s because there are no expectations on my part, or theirs.
While confident that in a dire emergency, I could choke down a Busch Light, allow me to petition the tear-bender to ensure the specimen is freezing cold because that’s a sure-fire “flavor” remover.
As for “demand” prefiguring supply, it remains that none of us are capable of spelling words immediately upon emerging from the womb; rather, we must learn how. Beer comprehension itself isn’t nature. It’s nurture. The same goes for needlepoint, open heart surgery or playing the tuba.
For me, the whole dynamic flips the very moment when someone makes claims that generate expectations.
You say that you’re the best golfer around? Show me, then. There are ways of confirming this assertion.
Disturbingly often, a newer generation of curated, collated and self-referentially chic restaurants and bars seem to be advancing the proposition that everything they know about beer, they learned in kindergarten. Unfortunately their beer lists prove it, and these scorecards usually reveal a great many triple bogeys, as opposed to an utter dearth of holes in one.
Given how unimpressive many beer lists are, even par is elusive. Perhaps they should consider putt putt.
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Mind you, I detest golf, and also never fail to be negatively triggered by the ready availability of hand-tugged free-range goat’s milk for a “craft” cocktail at $15, while a few feet away the frozen reach-in cooler “boasts” a purely derivative “curated” beer list comprised of AB-InBev mockrobrews, numerous taste-alike IPAs, Coors Banquet, Blue Ribbon, and various alcohol-delivery-seltzers listed piously (and mistakenly) under the “local beer” column.
Pretentiousness about spirits, cocktails and wine, when inflicted upon my consciousness at the expense of beer (my life’s work, you know) by today’s peak hospitality influencers just plain gripes my cookies.
And yes, it’s true that the word “pretentious” might well have described me during selected moments in the past, and if so, these lapses probably stemmed from an intense frustration that Kobe beef, white truffle and gooseneck barnacle enthusiasts were so often observed gushing all heavenly and rhapsodic about their foodie passion, then ordering a Miller Lite or High Life to wash those dollars down their gullets, subsequently babbling nonsensically about beers they evidently don’t understand by saying things like, “well, sometimes you just NEED a Michelob Ultra.”
No, you don’t. Not ever, in fact.
As the Brits might say, “don’t be a dozy pillock.” No one needs a Mich Ultra, unless it’s time to shampoo your canine or scrub a toilet.
Admittedly I used to think to myself that “two can play this excessively barmy game,” and duly retaliate with my own exceedingly high standard of beer-borne pretentiousness, to which I absolutely excel when challenged, although with approaching dotage I’ve usually thought better of it and decided that if the latest, greatest cocktail crafter or champagne snob wishes to be that way about it, then I quite consciously won’t play their game.
This plan of mine may even have worked on widely scattered occasions, although today isn’t one of them. As this essay attests, a better beer lover’s work truly is never done. Someone has to punch back, and it might as well be me, given that so many brewery owners contradict their own reason for being by stocking mass-market wet air behind the bar.
Stop it. Your fermenters are sobbing in embarrassment. Educate your customers, and leave the pandering to politicians.
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Several times a year a new bar or restaurant will debut in my general vicinity, and I prepare myself for the usual public relations hyperbole about the proprietor’s unalloyed genius in the field of avant-garde libations.
(As an aside, my preference has always been to author P.R. touts myself, rather than farm them out to people who can’t write, but I digress.)
My eyes begin to grow heavy as I’m assured that diamond-encrusted Asanti wheels attached with platinum cotter pins to the sleek chassis of sheer scientific mixology are to be boldly harnessed in pursuit of hitherto unreachably brilliant infused heights, as conjured by means of a séance in the mysterious cellar speakeasy or some other patented top-secret (and purely non-existent) process, to be shaken, not stirred, for the approbation of a grateful planet — or a few sodden barflies.
There’ll be vast and suitably pricey selections of all known distillates, wines and bubbly, mixology, theology, gee-whiz-ology and whatever other bits of rehashed imaginary gibberish that “newspaper” reporters never, ever bother questioning these days as they meekly accept every last portion of bilge being shoveled in their general direction by people who’d make P.T. Barnum blush.
And every last word of this is fine by me, seeing as I have no intention whatever of imbibing these miracle cocktails.
An occasional Negroni, yes, but keep the damn gold flakes out of it. What about the beer, I ask?
In truth it is quite rare for these hagiographic information releases to mention beer at all unless the new business is a small brewery, although these days we can’t always count on local breweries to acknowledge their own beer.
But usually I can find a menu on-line and see that yes, beer is available … and no, the selection isn’t at all unique or interesting, nothing a 25-year-old bar manager couldn’t order blindfolded by throwing rubber-tipped darts at a crystalline untappd barroom screen.
It drives me crazy knowing that whenever I ask exactly how such an ordinary collection of beer for the newest greatest bar in the city came to be chosen, one or the other variants of the same answer comes bouncing back at me.
“We have a rigorous panel of certified Cicerones who comb the finest craft and imported beers, carefully taste each of them, apply an algorithmic AI hops bath and blah blah blah blah.”
Give me an effing break, will you?
Do I look like I was born yesterday?
We all know the way this actually works. The wholesaler rep came in, quoted a three-case deal on abominable Silver Bullet, then said yeah, we can discount a keg of Rhinewurst Hazy Sour on top of that because the sell-by date is about to pass and it doesn’t draw flies at the city dump — and by the way, here’s a crate of cheap swag to amuse your coworkers.
Look, I’m aware of your stellar employment record and previous achievements. I don’t doubt for a second that you’re just as skilled as they say when it comes to the liquor, cocktail and wine side of things. I believe you, and wouldn’t think of denying you these talents, or seek to take anything away from you.
In fact, I hope your new bar succeeds, because it’s good for everyone else in town if it does.
But just one thing: I’ve been in the beer business a long time, and I speak more than one beer dialect, and when you throw this curatorial expertise verbiage at me and insist you’re hard at work on the beer list, it only insults my intelligence and makes me cranky to see yet another example of non-ironic underachievement.
Don’t kid a kidder, son.
In return for me displaying my characteristically remarkable equanimity, perhaps you might resolve to respect my know-how, too, and refrain from showing me a dozen beers like these, which are painstakingly predictable and purely average, all the while insisting they match your oft-touted lofty standards of Mezcal and Amontillado.
That’s because your beers don’t match up to your booze and plonk; they’re not even close, and wishing isn’t likely to make it so.
If you don’t know anything about beer, which I suspect is the case, then the very last thing you should do is ask a mass market beer wholesaler for help. Do you seriously think any of them know squat about beer?
In truth, admitting you know nothing about beer is the first step toward gaining greater proficiency. There are books you can read, videos to be watched, and information for absorbing. Go out and find someone to help you learn — you know, in a pinch, maybe even a genuine accredited Cicerone.
And you can trust the smaller wholesalers who specialize in better beer. Lacking mega-sellers like Modelo Corn Lager, they genuinely must be well-informed to survive.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my investment counselor just phoned with a hot tip on a company that makes rubber-tipped “curational” darts. All I need is a blindfold manufacturer — free-range handwoven alpaca, or bust.
Previously at “Hip Hops”: Do Texans have an Australian word for beer?
Hip Hops: Coopers Sparkling Ale — not Foster’s Lager — is Australian for BEER
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 
