What BEER(s) have you been drinking?

We're going to have to agree to disagree on this one, I think, Barnes. I'm glad you have the ability to live the lifestyle you feel is best, of course.

This whole question of what is being definied as "natural" is a big rolleyes for me with the organics/real food crowd.

In turn, I agree with you on two points. And both are things that are lost on a lot of the nutcases that you see in the "organics/real food crowd".

One is that it's a luxury to be able to choose this kind of lifestyle. It's a middle class privilege. Folks with less income can't do it. It takes a lot of work and a lot of consideration, so some people don't have the time or patience for it. It isn't for everybody, and I'll be the first to tell you that there aren't times when I think "damn, life would be so much easier if I just went out and got Taco Bell".

The other is that most people doing this kind of thing are total fucking flakes that kind of make up their own rules about things that are completely conditional.

I totally get the eye rolling, Steve...because it's one of those things where extremist idiots have taken over the whole thing and made it look freakish, weird, and utterly retarded.

Point is, do what's best for you...I'm still going to speak my piece about it, but I totally respect everyone's right to eat or drink whatever they want, no matter how crazy it is to me. On a larger, societal level this kind of consumption is problematic, but between individuals that is not and should not be an issue.

Space Ghost wrote:

A really long rant.

Look, I'm sure AB work very hard to make sure that their shitty beer is made uniformly shitty. I'm sure they spent a great deal of money developing their stringent standards of shittiness, and that those standards have adhered to with admirable regularity for many, many years.

Their beer is still shit. It's still made from cheap, crap ingredients, which is why it tastes like crap. The fact that people gravitate towards beers with more "drinkability" proves only that people who like to drink their beer by the 12 pack just want to get sloshed, and probably don't give a damn what their beer tastes like to begin with.

I've never seen a guy walk out of a convenience store with a 40 of Colt 45 and thought "You know, I'll bet he really enjoys the taste of that" either, though, so I guess I'm weird.

Yes, a lot of small brewers made bad beer before prohibition, a lot of them make bad beer now. Prohibition and WWII did, however, push what good American beer there was out of the market for quite a long time. I'm sure AB would still have the share of the market they have now even without those two events, but looking at how quickly microbrews and their own "craft" lines have been chipping away at that share, the fizzy yellow lager might not.

I totally get the eye rolling, Steve...because it's one of those things where extremist idiots have taken over the whole thing and made it look freakish, weird, and utterly retarded.

I love how you say that as if you weren't one of them.

Look, at least I'm not using those deodorant rocks and trying to tell you that wheatgrass juice tastes good, alright?

But wheat grass juice was designed to taste that way!

Prepare for a wall o tex.

mj -

From what I can tell, there is no support to show that the materials used by AB are subpar in either cost or quality. The fact that the combination of ingredients yields a beer that is not to your liking (or most professional beer raters, for that matter) is somewhat irrelevant. They do design it that way (nice smartass comment above...always appreciated), but it is merely to sell. And, yes, some of it is to people who want to get drunk. Some of it is due to affordability (but the cheaper beer has more to do with economies of scale, rather than quality of ingredient). A lot of it is because it is easy to drink in terms of refreshing. If I spend all day digging a ditch, it is a lot more refreshing to drink a Budweiser than it is to drink one of Wychwood's Goliath beers (my brewery of choice right now). Macro- beers are made bland to appeal to the most people....but taste is a subjective thing. I would say tha being the best selling beer says something for its quality (at some level). Otherwise, this criticism is borderline like telling people it is stupid to play mainstream boardgames.

MB --

We actually have a lot of overlap concerning natural food. There was a recent Time (and by recent, within the last 6 months?) magazine that discussed what natural/organic means and what sacrifices to our health are made when these are ignored. Basically, from worst to best is: beef, poultry/dairy, fish, fruit, vegetables. In fact, there has yet to be a scientific study to show that mass produced vegetables have fewer nutrients (and for most, the pesticides don't affect vegetables to near the degree as fruit) -- this is where the analogy with McDonalds breaks down. There is a huge difference between the quality of cattle mass produced by McD's and one that I raise in my back yard; however, there isn't a big difference between the barley grown on 10000 acres and barley grown in my garden.

And, I don't necessarily agree it isn't cheaper to buy "healthy". You can buy a shitload of dry goods (beans, brown rice, etc.) and frozen vegetables (4 servings for $1) on the extremely cheap. Meat and dairy is another story. We buy only free range chicken and eggs, organic milk, and wild caught fish, and I am amazed at how expensive it is comparatively. I do agree that it is easier. Once you are working full-time (or have two people working full-time) 60/hrs a week, it is an effort to cook dinner every night. I also don't think that the food industry has adjusted our palates to what they are selling. They have just found the combination of ingredients that capitalizes on the evolutionary design of our palates -- which are foods that are extremely dense in calories and fat. All held up by the ridiculous subsidy on corn, which I think gives Busch its god-awful taste.

Little of this has to do with beer though. Can you really argue that the nutritional and health value between the rice/hops/barley/malt AB uses is worse than the rice/hops/barley/malt that your favorite micro-brewery uses? Doubtful. And, I just think that your assertion that the taste of beer is degraded by mass-production and cost control is incorrect. I am almost certain that I read somewhere that the costs for the ingredients that AB uses to produce Budweiser and Michelob is more than the ingredients used at many microbreweries. The sell their beer cheap because enough people buy it to make it profitable ... and then, along with that comes discounted rates on ingredients.

Now, all in all, I fall on the side that you do on food (my dream would be to open a restaraunt, but I doubt that will happen given the investment in a graduate education that has nothing to do with food). I like chocolate bars with very high cacao (my favorite is some Spanish chocolate with red pepper in it....but it is about $9 a bar, so I have only had it once). My wife makes speciality cakes and one of her recipes is a dark chocolate cake (made with Dutch pressed cacao)....I loved it. I encouraged to make it for a party, and, well, most people just stuck to the more traditional yellow butter cake layer. It is just important not conflate "mass production" with "lower quality"...sometimes it is true, but sometimes it is just because that is what the option was for becoming a multi-billion dollar company.

This rant is starting to make me tired Lastly, I think most personality characteristics have been shown to be positively correlated. We are a bunch of geeks. We are in the upper-end of the distribution for boardgames. We are all likely going to like non-standard "food fare" (at least more than the average dude...I have relatives who won't even try fish, WTF?), we will like fancy beer, and we will like fancy bourbon/scotch. For many, cost would be an issue -- like mj says. I know people who won't spend $80 on a boardgame or $80 on a bottle of scotch....I would do both. We are a bunch of hedonistic, eccentric fuckers (hell, our whole criteria for evaluating a game is how much pleasure does it bring us). And, not surprisingly, are eccentricies run across many domains.


Related to gaming, it is a trivia game, so that might be a turn off, but the wife and I have enjoyed Foodie Fight on car rides. Opportunity to learn a lot of weird facts about food. There was something in the Mansions of Madness thread that prompted me to write an entire post relating concepts in food to board games, but, given this conversation, I might scrap it (or at least revisit it) I am trying a Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale right now, so so....nothing to get too excited about.

I legit love wheatgrass juice. Seriously, I could drink it all day. But, I'm an extremist vegan weirdo so what the fuck do I know about taste!

"Shitty beer" is 100% subjective. Just cause it's mainstream and/or popular doesn't mean it's shitty. Taste is taste. I greatly prefer a balls out hoppy imperial IPA, but that doesn't mean that PBR is objectively shitty in comparison.

From what I can tell, there is no support to show that the materials used by AB are subpar in either cost or quality.

I don't care how good the ground beef in your hamburger is, it's cheap compared to my choice rib eye. Whether their materials are of good quality relative to other cheaper ingredients is not something I'm disputing.

The fact that the combination of ingredients yields a beer that is not to your liking (or most professional beer raters, for that matter) is somewhat irrelevant.

Dude, adjuncts like corn and rice are cheaper than barley. Why are we even arguing this? I understand that they're used to lighten the body of the beer, but they also tend to make it taste awful.

Do you know a lot of people who like to drink warm Bud Light? I sure don't. Once you let those adjunct-riddled beers get a little warm, that corn taste starts to really come through, and then they go from bland to disgusting.

When you have to keep your beer almost frozen to make it palatable, then that's a pretty good indication that the flavor isn't really its big selling point.

Macro- beers are made bland to appeal to the most people....but taste is a subjective thing. I would say tha being the best selling beer says something for its quality (at some level).

It says something about the quality of its marketing, but little else. We all know that people can't tell the difference between one of these beers and the other half the time. This shady bar in my town has $.50 draft night on Wednesdays, and the place is always packed. They tell everyone it's Bud Light, but they really just put a keg of Busch on tap and leave the Bud Light handle on there. Sometimes, they'll do the same thing with Coors and Keystone.

Needless to say, nobody ever seems to notice the difference. I'd bet good money AB could pull the same switcheroo with their Bud Light bottles and it'd still be the best selling beer.

Otherwise, this criticism is borderline like telling people it is stupid to play mainstream boardgames.

So?

I don't have a lot at stake here, but unless I am crazy, rice is about 3x more expensive than Barley. It has been more expensive for about 25 years.

As of August 2010, a cost of a metric ton in US dollars

Rice: 486.86
Barley: 161.03
Corn: 175.37

www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=barley&months=300
www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=corn&months=300
www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=rice&months=300

FWIW, I think that the corn-adjuncts creates a much worse beer than rice-adjuncts (there is a huge difference between Busch and Bud, IMO --- but, I imagine you are right about most not noticing)

And, I never claimed its flavor is its selling point. In fact, I think it is its lack of flavor --- that is what most people like.

Interesting. Everything I've read up until this point says the rice and corn (especially the corn) are cheaper. Perhaps they're referring to the malt product.

I downed one of those Miller Lite personal kegs they have have now over the course of my last gaming session.

It made the shitty beer I swill slightly less shitty!

Corn is cheaper because of asinine US domestic policy protecting farmers. You can thank the US senate for that one.

Gary Sax wrote:

Corn is cheaper because of asinine US domestic policy protecting farmers. You can thank the US senate for that one.

"Farmers" in this case meaning primarily immense conglomerates like ADM, who receive massive subsidies and then use them to purchase congresspeople.

Space Ghost, even when you're dead wrong you're one of the best debaters here at F:AT.

Two points (not really beer-related):

- I don't think anyone with a lick of intellegence eats organic/natural because of the assumption that nutritional quality is higher. An organic apple has just the same nutrients as a non-organic one. The issue is how it's grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and other agents. It's also about supporting smaller farms. I belive in that piece you also alluded to drinking beer as a nutritional thing...which is awesome.

- It _is_ cheaper to eat natural/organic if you can cook and have the time. We eat a lot of prepared foods, but they're all natural/organic and with minimal ingredients. I love to go the farmer's market and cook, but I don't get to do that much these days.

Man, I want a Tumbler.

The issues about supporting smaller farms and sustainability is one I imagine that we are on the same page on. Somewhat relatedly, just got some Victory Point games yesterday...hope to give one of them a run tonight. I can already tell that I am going to love Circus Train.