At a recent Beer Bloggers Conference in Europe, Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster, Garrett Oliver, brought up a couple interesting topics: beer ratings and de-geekifying beer for casual beer drinkers.
The latter meaning developing a vocabulary around describing flavors and things more easily understood by a broader range of people (versus things like IBUs that are more difficult and perhaps, less important to understand). “A winemaker would ‘never ever, ever, ever’ tell you the number of tannins in their wine because it doesn’t sound delicious. Oliver concedes that brewers can be just as guilty as drinkers of communicating about beer like this “and should be called out on it.”
With respect to beer ratings, Oliver touches on a topic that is probably more divisive: should brewers read reviews? Some do, some don’t.
Oliver argues no unless you are looking for flattery. If you get a negative review and then use that information change your beer, you should probably go home and become a banker, Oliver says. If you get a negative review with the intent to change nothing, then why do you care?
Oliver’s platform is that brewers are artists, at one point drawing an analogy that music fans would be horrified if Bob Dylan ever used focus groups to make albums. “One of the definitions of an artist is that they do not listen to you,” says Oliver. Given the audience, the point seems to be not to be offended if brewers don’t read your feedback on their beers.
But are beers works of art as Oliver suggests or are they more conventionally considered to be consumer products? It would seem that there are elements of both.
The topics start at the 15:38 mark.
Beers are consumer products, not works of art. Beer are made to be drunk and not contemplated. Unlike art, you don’t need a prior body of knowledge in order to properly appreciate beer, you only need to drink it and pay a bit of attention to it, and your opinion will be as qualified as the next.
That said, I agree with Oliver on this one. If a brewer makes good beer and knows how to sell it, people will want to buy it, what a handful of (often disgruntled) geeks may think of it, it’s their problem.
negative reviews helps breweries determine what markets are getting their beer old. I know for a fact that Greg Koch of Stone has read/watched my reviews mostly because I complain that the beers are out of code sitting on the shelf. They’re trying to alleviate that problem.
And Garret is right and wrong. yes, beer is art. But if no one buys your art you’re not going to be getting paid for it anymore. Let’s not kid ourselves, Brooklyn does make plenty of beers aimed at the mass market. They’re not Dogfish Head where they can put out the craziest recipe and it will sell. Joe Six Pack will buy Brooklyn Lager, he won’t be buying a $15 bottle of a Brooklyn one-off.
Beer is people!
Beers are comsumer products AND works of art. Thats why it’s called Craft beer. Because there are so many components to the process from ingredients to the brewing process.
Having an experienced palate helps you to determine the differences in beer styles and with education you can articulate these things.
A brewer should take mass opinions to heart, not changing a recipe or process with each bad review. But to know what styles are your strong points. This is why DFH brews some of the best IPA’s in America. Sam knows what his specialty is and has built a hell of a company from it.
Oliver and Brooklyn Brewery’s real concern should be why I can’t get fresh product in my market. When cases arrive at retail stores that are already past their best by date or pushing close to it, someone along the supply chain is letting the beer drinker down. This goes for any brewery with wide distribution. If you package beer and it sits in your warehouse for a couple months before you offload it to a distributor a thousand miles away who sits on it for another couple months, guess what happens by the time it hits the shelves? It sits there even longer while people walk right past it to choose something else that’s actually fresh.
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I left a longer comment the other day that did not seem to make it to your servers. I’ll give you the tl;dr version of it.
I think scores are kind of pointless and arbitrary. Beer is incredibly subjective and no matter how impartial you set out to be every reviewer will have a personal preference in style and sub-style.
I try to just simply break down the beer to explain to readers what to expect. Almost advertisement without the hype. If my readers trust my palate it could help them explore new craft beers.
So no ratings on my reviews but I do end with two criteria, is this something I would buy again and is it worth the price on the bottle. I think that is a clearer indication of quality than a letter grade.
Hmm..and yet ratings website seem to rise to or near the top in their niches (thinking Beer Advocate, RateBeer, Yelp, Zagat, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Metacritic, various gaming websites, etc.). While any standalone review, yours included, may or may not stray the consumer in the right direction, a consensus of reviews more likely would provided they are presented in the right context.
I do think ratings websites could do a better job of laying out a roadmap or difficulty rating for appreciating different styles and genres but I don’t have the solution for how that would be done. For example, while there are exceptions, most people will take to a witbier more quickly than a true Lambic.
The number ratings on RateBeer and Beer Advocate are not very handy to me and I would hope that brewers aren’t wasting their time trying to hit some magical arbitrary number like video game publishers with Metacritic (which is a flawed aggregator).
I probably couldn’t figure out the difference between ranks 85-95 and I’m not sure if some of the 100’s are because they are the perfect examples of beer or just great marketing and hype.
I guess all I’m trying to say in a very long winded way, the words of a review mean more than a rating system.
Once again, video evidence that all brewers are awkward, arrogant and cringe-inducingly-weird individuals. Brew my beer and stay in the basement.
What an uncomfortable talk… he definitely did not hit is marks and get all the reaction he was expecting from the crowd, or so it seems.
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To me, beer is art and beer is about the art of taste. A taste experience is and was always meant to be an individual experience, not a decision made on the opinions of others. BeerAdvocate’s 63 could be my 95. It’s up to me and what I know about my palate to decide.
Craft beer is already overwhelming and intimidating. Arbitrary scores and verbose reviews do nothing to help the newer consumers cross over to craft, unless they are content to follow the hype behind the highest scores. Granted many of the high scoring beers are really good but they also carry a lot of hype behind them. Hype distorts your perception and had let me down many times over the last year and a half.
Rating sites only rise to the top because it’s likely a matter of “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” We are creatures of comfort. We don’t really like change. Plus, it’s fun to pass judgment on a product and feel like you are an opinion to be reckoned with so the approach is prevalent. Everybody wants to be the expert to everyone else.
That, and everyone wants a quick answer. How many times have you relied on a ratings site only to come away from the product or experience feeling like much was missing for you?
I definitely agree that advice from a trusted palate/review can be really beneficial but I stand by a consensus pool of ratings also being beneficial. Each may work better than the other depending on the scenario.
To me, beer is art and beer is about the art of taste. A taste experience is and was always meant to be an individual experience, not a decision made on the opinions of others. BeerAdvocate’s 63 could be my 95. It’s up to me and what I know about my palate to decide.
To be fair, this could be said about just about everything…cars, toothpaste, computers and so on.
A quick shout out to Tomasz Kopyra for post the video: http://blog.kopyra.com/index.php/2013/08/10/garrett-oliver-z-brooklyn-brewery-na-ebbc13/
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