A Treatise on Beer

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, even as a passing acquaintance, that I like beer. I really like beer. For me, beer is more of a pastime than it is just a drink: I’ve been brewing it for eight years, and have been enjoying its taste for about half my life now.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest has shaped my tastes enormously. Cascadia has an unbelievably rich beer culture; my home states of Oregon and Washington have almost 300 breweries between them alone. Washington itself grows 25% of the world's supply of hops, and more than 75% of the nation's. As such, distinct styles of ale have evolved from the region, usually typified by large quantities of hops. I have always been a big fan of IPAs, CDAs, barley wines, anything aggressively hopped, and anything with the word Imperial in its name.

A recent hop harvest from Washington's Yakima Valley.

In contrast, I have never liked German beer. That assertion has always come with an important caveat, however. Imagine spending some time in Munich, and while you’re there, you run across some American beer in a market or a biergarten. What do you think it would be? What kind of beer do you think is produced in enough quantity and has enough marketing power to make it across the globe? Coors, maybe? Pabst? I think that, more often than not, you’ll end up with a beverage that reduces beer to a caricature of tacky American culture, rather than what I would consider an accurate representation of American beer. It doesn’t seem far-fetched, then, to believe that most of the German beer I’ve had in the States probably suffers from the same problem. I don’t like the German beer I've had in the US, then, but I have always said I would withhold my judgment until I get to try it the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. 

Welp, guess what? I just spent about three weeks in Germany. I drank a lot of German beer. And yeah, it’s pretty good: crisp, refreshing, even palatable warm. It doesn’t seem to have the distinctiveness that I’m used to in a beer: I could drink fifteen bottles of Hacker-Pschorr Weisse in a row, and then not be able to pick it out in a taste test. But that’s okay. When it really comes down to it, drinking a beer is more about the circumstances, the story, and the surroundings than it is about the taste. Hey! I got to go to Bavaria and have a Gemütlichkeit with a bunch of other Germans over Maßkrüge of Helles from a brewery that's older than my country! That’s going to bias the ol’ taste buds no matter how you cut it.

But last night came the real challenge. You see, I actively dislike Belgian beer. Belgian beer is characterized by a rather sour and yeasty flavor, which is imparted by Brettanomyces bruxellensis, a wild strain of yeast that is usually viewed in the brewing world as a contaminant more than a desirable. Belgian beers are a huuuuuuge trend in the beer scene right now, and there are many bars and even breweries in the Pacific Northwest that specialize in Belgians, and only Belgians. I’ve tried them enough to know that I don’t like them very much, and I've never thought I needed to go to Belgium to be sure.

And yet, there I was in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, the proverbial center of Europe, on a Friday night. And wouldn’t you know it, but that very evening happened to mark the beginning of Belgian Beer Weekend 2013, right in the center of the Grand Place, with over 350 Belgian beers on tap from more than 50 different breweries. Clearly, for better or worse, this was not an opportunity I could let go to waste.

Belgian Beer Weekend in the Grand Place, Brussels.

Belgians (the people) are insane about their beer. Beer festivals of one type or another can usually be found somewhere in town. One of the more prominent buildings in the Grand Place is a brewers' museum. Even the iconic and celebrated Manneken Pis is occasionally hooked up to a keg of beer to dispense libations for passersby. And on this night, people were out in full force for the occasion: thousands of people pressed up shoulder to shoulder, jovial and lighthearted, and thirsty, thirsty, thirsty. I fought my way through the gambrinous crowd for three hours in order to conduct my scientific survey.

The results: I still don't like Belgian beer. Don't get me wrong, I had some good ones. And as in Germany, the atmosphere was as fun and authentic as it gets. But dammit, most of them just taste weird. But hey, now I know for sure. And in the end, in the name of science, a little pickling of my liver for the sake of knowledge was worth it.

No seriously, this really happens.