There is no sense in aguing or offending people about their taste in beer. No knowledge or cost or fancy names and commercials beats individual taste buds. If you like it , you like it even if millions hate it. A very old roman saying is degustibus non est disputandem...matters of taste cannot be disputed.
There are some outstanding beers out there now. A given brewery may make 8 varieties of crap but have one outstanding type. You never know until you taste it.
One of the big arts and sciences of beer making involves yeast. It can be approached from the point of view of a microbiologist or from the point of view of the artison brewer. Some places spend thousands on their yeast operations to get pure strains of a particular type. Lambics on the other hand were originally brewed (and many still are today) by brewing in buildings with big louvered windows on the ceilings to allow yeast from the surrounding lanscape to blow in with the wind. Yeast , hops grains and water are all imortant to beer. When I was big into beer competitions I would add 3 kinds of salt to my water. I did not add the salts for their own flavor as you might think. I added Gypsum , epsom and table salt to insure there were calcium , potasium and sodium ions available for the yeast. Healthy thriving yeast is essential to good brewing and these ions in the water are like vitamins for the yeast. Some very famous beers , bass ale for one, became famous because of a lucky mineral content of the water in the area where they were originally brewed.
Hops have a huge effect on the taste of beer. Different hops have totally different character. Also , with the same hops you can produce totally different flavors by when in the brewing process you add them. I used to import my hops from germany about 80 pounds at a time when I was brewing a lot. No better aroma hops exist than a particular type of german hops. After all the work and research, and expense to locate the best hops and have them shipped to the USA , you could totally waste all that effort by being off by just two minutes when you added them to the wort. Brewing is a great hobby. You can learn as much as your heart desires or you can brew great tasting beer with just a little knowledge and experience.
Bottom line its all about taste and that is a personal preference thing. There are no absolutely good or bad beers. Its only good or bad relative to your own taste preference. I once brewed a Porter that received perfect scores from all but one of the judges in a contest. One judge scored it one point below perfect. However , I know for a fact that half the people who drink nothing but American Rice beer like Bud would not like that porter at all.
In the immortal words of Ben Franklin....beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy.
Threaded Mode