Wednesday 29 July 2009

Boring beer

I read lots of complaints about boring beer. Especially in regard to the GBBF. But what is boring beer?

Of course, it's a very subjective thing, boredom. What bores the pants, jacket, scarf, tie, shirt, hat, underwear, shoes, toupee, incontinence pads and socks off me might set your heart racing like a speed freak in a ferrari. For some, boring beer is anything you can get hold of easily. Stuff you don't have to sell your children into slavery to pay for, travel to Timbuktu to fetch or sleep on a pavement three months queueing for.

My perspective is different. I happily drank little but Tetley's Mild for almost for seven years. Living in Leeds, finding a pub without it was a challenge. Now I rarely stray from the holy trinity of St. Bernardus 6, 8 and 12 when drinking at home. Beers I really like never get dull.

If neither ubiquity nor ease of purchase set me yawning, what does? That's trickier to put my finger on. Lack of subtlety? Perhaps. But that's not quite it . . .

I need to have a think.

Shit. That was the last bottle of Abt.

8 comments:

Matt said...

Ron, are the adverts on this blog autogenerated? The one below today's post, 'Stop Drinking Alcohol', is particularly jarring/apposite depending on you point of view!

Ron Pattinson said...

Yeah, I'd noticed that. I thought the computer was trying to tell me something . . .

Mike said...

What about the ad for Scientology - that was even worse! Stop drinking and give all your money to scoundrels? Thank god for ad-blockers!

Unknown said...

I don't think the beer in the picture can be classed as boring. Good beer? No! But not boring. It is, I suspect, better a stripping paint than it is at pleasing the drinker though.

Just my view having drunk it.

Ron Pattinson said...

Woolpack Dave, hops, hops and more hops. What could be more boring that that?

Alan said...

For me, if I can't sense the presence of a grain texture of some sort or another it's boring and over produced. And if it's out of whack - that's boring, too.

Don't care particularly what else is in there - hoppy or malty or yeasty or what - but grainy and balanced is my minimum standard.

Adrian said...

Incidentally, I found that aging that beer for about a year really mellows out the oak and hop flavors nicely leaving some interesting raisin-like flavors and aromas.

Pivní Filosof said...

Boring beer, good beer, bad beer. It's all a bit subjective, isn't it?

If I had to choose, when tasting a new beer, I prefer it to be really bad than really boring. At least the former will be somehow memorable and will give me someting to talk about