Ahem

Some commenter over at unfogged summed up what the supposed advantages of Bud are- you can drink it for hours and not get drunk and it doesn’t taste bad because it has no taste. I’m not sure I agree that the last one is even true, but suppose it is. Those may be good things in some drinks but it’s awfully hard to argue that they are virtues in a beer.

Its like making love in a canoe…..

Daniel- don’t reveal yourself as such a light-weight!

Of course, J-M Rock also says he wouldn’t pay two Euros for a Bud, and he brews a beer that’s nothing like Bud. To present this article as an argument against microbrews is silly. It’s mostly a debate between the dazzlers (Sam Calagione) and the more restrained (Garrett Oliver) within the US craft beer community.

That hop quote is from Oliver. His Brooklyn Lager has way more hops than Bud.

I’m with Grand Moff Texan. Usually I lean towards Belgian-style ales but with the right kind of food (spicy) I love me some Stone Arrogant Bastard, which is the kind of beer that quote seems to be making fun of.

This is an important part of the quote, I think, which follows what was included above:

“People would rather pay a little more and have a special product than to pay a lot for a Pilsner and have something banal,” he said. “I like Budweiser, but I wouldn’t pay two euros for a Budweiser.”

In other words, the brewmaster at Orval likes Budweiser because it is a good value for the money, not because it is an inherently good beer.

Long Sunday-night drive from North Tahoe skiing back to Silicon Valley. Heavy cold North California winter rainstorm. Visible from miles away, the red glow of the Budweiser plant on the south side of 80 glowers through the rain and steam and mists that wreath the enormous glowing Budweiser logo stamped across the brute metal facade of this gargantuan industrial machine.

And the product tastes every bit that good. Especially in cans.

For hot summer day refreshment, I used to drink Sam Adams Golden Pilsner, which I thought was everything Bud could have been. I never see it anymore, and I believe they stopped making it.

15: and it’s that kind of dedication and attention to high quality manufacturing that have made the US auto industry what it is today.

There are much, much better unpretentious, simple lagers than Budweiser. Carlsberg, Amstel and Peeterman Artois knock it into a cocked hat and are hardly exclusive tipples of beer snobs. American mass market beer simply sucks.

Daniel @ 13: you may support Mrs McCain’s product, but sometimes you talk sense. People: always recycle your beer cans and save the planet. If you flatten them, you can get more in the bag/skip/recycling thing.

That hop quote is from Oliver. His Brooklyn Lager has way more hops than Bud.

Yeah, but so does tapwater.

c.l. ball, that’s totally true — but c’mon, you still like those, at least a little bit, right? It would be fine if everyone didn’t try and jump on the bandwagon…

Wow, pretty impressive that Daniel managed to mine the only two pro-Budweiser quotes out of an article celebrating strange new brewing.

What about this one:

“[Dogfishead] is to Budweiser what a bouillabaisse is to fish stock.”

The salt analogy is really crappy. If you want a better analogy, it would probably be along the lines of hops in beer = fat in cooking. The trend is towards more flavor (even if it’s unbalanced and very American in it’s more= better way).

This sentiment is kind of amusing b/c it betrays a lack of understanding of how salt is used. Salt adds flavor! That’s why it’s used! I think a steak would be a better example than a soup, but the point is that you add salt to food to add taste. But if you add too much, it doesn’t taste good anymore. The same is true of hops.

The guy is a brewmaster for a Trapist monestary in Belgium. The article doesn’t say whether he’s a monk himself, and you wouldn’t think a Trappist would be gving interviews–but the point is, there’s nothing in the article suggesting that the guy has much experience with the more exotic varieties of American beers. So, when he ays Budweiser is the best, there is no reason to suppose he means anything other than better than Miller and Coors, which is not unreasonable.

Hamms is unjustly despised.

I would also love it if, when I go to all the trouble of editing out my spelling and grammatical errors, that the latest version of my text would actually publish, instead of some wierd morphing of the last two minutes of typing…

“the point is that you add salt to food to add taste”
Or, your sense of taste is what tells you the salt has been added. And your sense of taste is wired into your metabolic system in complex ways that allow you to interpret the body’s lack of or need for nutrients, which is experienced as things tasting good, or not. Not always but originally, its purpose being to indicate not as an end in itself.
As vestigially taboo here as anywhere is actual mention of the pharmaceutical effect of hops, as much an herb as it is anything else, which effect is not at all negligible.
So that some will prefer the hops experience and respond to the presence of hops in the taste of their beer with appreciation accordingly, others not.
If you can taste the hops distinctly they’ll be having a distinguishable mood-altering effect. Unless they’re decaf.
In completely outlaw contexts like that surrounding say cannabis, such effects can be evaluated openly, such as it may be whilst said evaluation takes place underground except in say Amsterdam, and yet often in intricate and relatively precise analytic detail.
Sativa v. indica, the Northern Light grand-daughter strain crossed into the Hindu Kush by way of Humboldt Violet. Taste in those discussions bearing only the role of indicator, the way it was once in wine-tasting before that was taken over by neo-Puritan nouveaux riches back in the 80’s.
Taste tells you what’s in there, and experience linked with taste tells you what what’s in there is likely to do.
There are millions of people around seemingly who will discuss at length the taste of a wine but who can only discuss the taste of it and its “nose” when they’re debating its merits.
Not a word to the high, the quality of the state of inebriation provided, when that is in fact the chief distinction and value of excellent wine, that it confers a delightfully altered state, pharmaceutically distinct from lesser vintages, with even at extremes of indulgence a relatively negligible come-down, or hangover.
Which is not to say that ridiculous over-consumption of even the best wines won’t exact a price, but that the state of sensible inebriation is discernibly better, less dull, less mindless, more ebullient.
Taste signals that, the potential of that state in the wine, as do smell and even color. That’s why taste is important, as more than just another hedonist pleasure channel.
Not that taste can’t be hoodwinked into sending the wrong message. Viz. the McDonald’s Corporation and its products.

There are millions of people around seemingly who will discuss at length the taste of a wine but who can only discuss the taste of it and its “nose” when they’re debating its merits. Not a word to the high, the quality of the state of inebriation provided, when that is in fact the chief distinction and value of excellent wine, that it confers a delightfully altered state

Wasn’t discussion of wine in the ancient world more focused on quality of high/hangover? Possibly because most of what they were drinking was hugely inconsistent in taste if not partway spoiled. We can do much better now, which gives us a chance to discuss subtle flavors.

I’m not convinced that “quality of high” is observable in practice. There are too many variables to control (amount drunk, drinking schedule, food eaten, etc.), all of which participate in feedback loops with the quality of high. There’s no real way to make repeatable observations of a dynamic process which is quite likely chaotic.

And that’s why I cheerfully ignore advice about hangover-free liquors, hangover preventatives, and hangover cures.

Theo, our comments passed in the vestibule. Yours entering the room before mine, which was a reply to your other, first, comment.
Your second piece seems to be saying that the ignorant primitives of long ago only talked about the high/hangover features of their chosen intoxicants because they lacked the technologies to produce higher quality ones?
And we have those higher technologies, so we can talk more about the taste and smell of them? Being thus more refined etc.
Are you really saying that? You can’t be.
You’re certainly free to ignore or pay attention to anything you choose, but ignoring hangover cures etc, at least some of which are decidedly effective, if you choose to indulge to the point of being inevitably hung over, seems childish and confused at best.

Daniel, I’ve met a fair number of people who have tried to tell me that, really, McDonalds is pretty good. Or that Sabaro’s is a great pizza, as good as anything else really, and that it’s all just snobbery to say otherwise. Or that the coffee at 7-eleven really is just as good as that at La colombe, and that the sharp cheddar cheese at the super market is just as good as that fancy cave-aged stuff, or that Paul McCartney is just as good as Bach. But we all know, and usually even they know, that they just have low tastes in some areas. That doesn’t make them bad people, as having low tastes in beer doesn’t make you a bad person, and even if a chef sometimes likes eating McDonalds that doesn’t make it good food. The same, obviously enough, goes for Bud. (I know that trolling your own blog is fun, too, but I’m sure you can see that this is what you’re doing here.)

Well, now we know you’re wrong on this stuff even more than I would have thought! At least we know it’s not just a beer thing…

Hops can be more easily compared to hot chili peppers

I was going to write almost your post. I’d have used habaneros, though.

“Are you man enough to eat this?” If so, pile on more habaneros and less of everything else.

And when people say they like it, are they lying, or is it cognitive dissonance, or what?

Are we arguing the audacity of hope or the adequacy of hops? though I ask as I uncork another cheap Bordeaux from Trader Joe. The tragic simplicity of Bud or any such industrial brew is that it’s always the same from day to day. Corona, Dos Equis, siempre la misma cerveza. ¡Basta ya!

Beer, like life, should be variable, unpredictable, surprising. Gratifyingly delightful sometimes, foregiveably disappointing occasionally, as we may be ourselves. Judge not what you drink, lest you be drunk.

Would anyone turn down a Bud if it was free and was all that was offered over the course of, say, an hour?

“Beer, like life, should be variable, unpredictable, surprising.”

This is false. Many things are good precisely because they are unlike life in this respect, which is often variable in unpleasant ways. Beer is liquid bread and, like bread, it is a staple, not a garnish. Many wonderful staple foods are destroyed when morons make them surprising — this is particularly true of ethnic and cultural staples when bobby-over-flayed Americans get their hands on them and start gourmetifying them. Hey these wasabi-flavored chived sprinkled French baguettes are to die for! They go particularly well with my chipotle cinnamon stout!

_It seems reasonable that food that appeals to that many people would be inoffensive. _

But this is surely false, of course. It applies to Twinkies, McDonald’s cheese burgers, valveta (SP?) cheese, Spagettiios, and a huge other amount of garbage. Now, this doesn’t mean that everything that’s popular or has large appeal is bad, of course, but just that because something has large appeal doesn’t mean it’s not awful.

Then again, Daniel says he thinks McDonalds isn’t bad, either, so we know something about his tastes

Even better, you know the same thing about the tastes of Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay, so the list of people who you can feel superior to because of your rarified princess-and-the-pea sensibilities is even greater. (“Zounds! Me? Drink Budweiser? The idea! I may swoon!”)

” I allow people to, say, enjoy reading Harry Potter or Jonathan Strange. They’re just people who don’t really like literature—not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
But I DO believe that taste in literature does say something fundamental about a person’s character, while I DONT believe that taste in beer does.

It’s curious the different prejudices we have. For example, I think that people who drink cola in the morning instead of coffee are revealing a moral defect — they’re probably childish enthusiasts with bad judgment. I know it’s ridiculous to react that way but I do. I have a sneaking suspicion that people who drink tea in the morning (if they’re not British) are not quite reliable. And people who take sugar in their coffee are probably honest enough but they might turn out to lack backbone in a crisis. So although it’s not a prejudice I share, I can see how some people might believe that choosing to drink Bud demonstrates a character flaw, not merely personal taste.

It’s What Republicans Do: Overview Of the Coleman Franken Recount

Some of you just have bland palates that need extreme defibrillation to get your taste buds jump started. Either that, or admitting this would just cause too much cognitive dissonance.

It might also be that people, their tastes, and their very nerve endings are different and therefore some of them should have pianos dropped on their heads.

Okay, Daniel. If you say so. I’m sorry that suggesting that your own tastes might not be great in every area has hurt you so, as it seems to have. This especially so when I am happy to admit that I have low tastes in many areas, too, as do we all. In the future we’ll never criticize anyone’s tastes, and we’ll all have great taste, as you obviously do in beer.

“Even better, you know the same thing about the tastes of Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay,”
This is incorrect, White said something positive about McDonald’s consistency and Ramsay replied that in addition to being a health hazard “McDonald’s . . . is consistently bland.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-gospel-according-to-gordon-ramsey-warning-it-may-be-enough-to-put-you-off-your-breakfast-446699.html

“some of them should have pianos dropped on their heads.”

As the song says, people should be beat up for stating their beliefs.

“The artistic judgment of ‘good’ includes, at least, the implication that one ought to find it valuable, and that those who fail to find it valuable have misjudged it or missed something… but isn’t that a category mistake

CDK, yes, but who cares? Some people like crap and they should be made aware of the fact that they like crap. Some people like crap solely because it has a fancy name or because society tells them that it’s not crap, and as a corollary of this they insist in a very annoying way that non-crap is crap. This too should be mocked.

notsneaky,

If culinary judgments aren’t judgments of taste, then no, we should _not_ make people aware of the fact that they like crappily crafted things, since who cares if people truly enjoy crappily-crafted things and don’t pretend their judgment is anything more than of enjoyment? It’s cheaper and easier for them, and leaves all the more well-crafted crap for the picky crafts snobs. For this reason, I agree that we should mock those who insist non-crap is crap. But only because on culinary matters, nothing is “crap” or “non-crap” aesthetically speaking. (Put another way, mock people with bad taste in art, not people with bad taste in crafts. Indeed, mock anyone who takes crafts seriously.)

I also agree that we should make people aware of the fact that they like crap–but only when it comes to true aesthetic judgments. I also agree that the proper way to do this is to mock them, preferably meanly. But that’s because misinformed, mistaken aesthetic judgments actually make the world an uglier, less satisfying place for all, including the misjudgers, and because they harm creators of aesthetically valuable art.

This is less clearly the case with crap-smanship. Crappily crafted things tend to be of mediocre, not bad, quality, and they tend to be that way because they serve a very useful function: crafted well enough to do the job at little cost. These things don’t make the world an uglier, less satisfying place for all, but only for snobs who get their sense of self-esteem by purchasing, displaying and talking about worthless crap that’s of a higher caliber than other people’s worthless crap. Craft snobs are, in this sense, analogous to fashion snobs, since their happiness depends on arbitrary distinctions, not aesthetically substantive ones (they are not, in other words, part of the reality-based community). For this reason, their happiness, like that of fashion snobs, doesn’t count. I think we should mock these people, and actively support anything that makes the world ugler and less satisfying _to them_.

Ronnie P @7,

His Brooklyn Lager has way more hops than Bud

When we lived there, the Brooklyn Brewery sponsored (and ergo sold beer at) the wonderful Celebrate Brooklyn summer concert series in Prospect Park. On a visit after we’d returned to Europe, we discovered to our horror that the sponsor was now AB, and no, they weren’t content to simply pony up but let BB go on selling the beer. We also visited the man who runs the festival, whose son had been friendly with ours during our two Brooklyn Years, and scolded him roundly. With a sheepish shrug, he noted that he had a festival to run, and that AB had deep pockets. No doubt it would have salved his conscience to learn that Daniel thinks Bud a good beer, but the poor man knew not that balm. AB are still sponsor, BTW, as I learned this summer when we went to hear Brazilian Girls. The music (not least that from the opening acts) was almost good enough to make me forget my annoyance. Almost.

Nick L @ 19,

American mass market beer simply sucks

True to a first approximation. But don’t let Bud and Coors mislead you, there are some half decent American non-“craft” beers out there. Yuengling’s certainly springs to mind. I suspect that, in export markets like New York, it benefits from something of a Coolness Bonus. But in Pennsylvania, there is nothing in the least Exotic about it; it is Just Beer. And it’s a Yank beer I’d non-ir0nically offer to a German. Nobody here would mistake it for anything German, but I think a lot of people would like it. There’s plenty of mediocre and even bad German beer, BTW, not least where I live (which, to be fair, is traditionally a cider rather than a beer region). It’s just that the Purity Law limits the extent of the badness German brewers can achieve.

RB @51,

Would anyone turn down a Bud if it was free and was all that was offered over the course of, say, an hour?

Yes, I’ve done so myself. To be accurate, what I turned down was a second Bud. (I note, at some risk of prompting Daniel to mount his other hobby horse of that name, that AB are not allowed to call it “Budweiser” here .) This was at the Togo-Korea match in the group round of the 2006 World Cup. Purely to stick it to the chaibe Schwobe, Sepp Blatter had negotiated a deal that made (American) Budweiser the only beer sold in German stadia during the whole of the WC. (Not the worst of Blatter’s sins, surely, but the one for which watching demons prodding him with pitchforks for all eternity will be most enjoyable.) Before taking our seats we grabbed, as we customarily do in the Waldstadion, a beer and a bratwurst. This was on a sunny, humid, blistering day, the sort of day on which, one is told, American beer is sort of not really that bad at all, actually, if taken ice cold. Half an hour into the first half I was asked did I want another. I did not, and stuck with Apfelschorle for the rest of the match.

Well let me be the first, John, to defend the humble, quotidian “Selz” against all those hypothetical snobs complaining about its watery, industrial taste. And I quite like the idea of you as a beer baron. In that alternative universe, I assume you’re a Republican.

My objection to branded products is partly Heraclitean: you can’t drink the same bottle twice, not least since the first bottle changed the biochemical environment you call yourself. Apart from that, a cold brew after a spate of physical labor on a hot day isn’t the same as a bottle from the same batch on the patio in the cool of the evening.

It’s trivially true that non-industrial beverages vary from batch to batch, year to year, like any agricultural product. Where are the snow peas of yesteryear? I encounter difference in every glass (I try to control this by opening only one bottle at a time) and I entice myself to continue by promising that the next one will be as good as the last, but interestingly different.

Dsquared’s own opinion is product placement. That’s what you wanted me to say, right?

Raising little Attilas can be spendy. They often kill their own fathers in their eagerness to take power, too. It will be like a family comedy, except with more bloodshed.

Budweiser asked themselves: “What one man in Europe is best capable of making us cool?” The question answered itself.

@50 C.K. Dexter. The analogy doesn’t really hold up. People who like Budweiser and similar industrial brews generally do not like even mild craft beers. Many people who like Harry Potter are both voracious and discriminating readers and just as likely to vary their reading diets with your “literature.” Tolstoy with tatertots, why not?

Good comment, Seth, but can’t you argue that Budweiser expresses a mass production ethic that in itself has a craft dimension of the sort you describe? I would argue that mass production is(was) a particular genius of America. It doesn’t aim for subtlety in its products, but historically an immense amount of craft went into the development of standardized, mass-produced food and drink that reliably appeal across a wide range of tastes.

I was a McDonald’s cook in 1967-8. My cooking training was 15 minutes and mostly was about keeping the area clean. I refused to eat the hamburgers I cooked, and so did all of my coworkers.We weren’t boycotting McDonalds, we were boycotting me. And I was the most adamant boycotter of the bunch.

I only ate the fish sandwiches, which were hard to ruin, and I eat them even today in a pinch. With a more interesting bun and a more interesting sauce they’d be absolutely good.