Half empty or half full?
This post is dedicated to Simon Cowell, Gordon Ramsay and any other person who hates everything.
I made a trip to the DC area over the weekend for a beer-related event. While standing in line for a brew I chatted with a local distribution rep about North Carolina beer.
“Anything that you’ve really liked?” I asked. “I feel like NC beer is constantly growing in popularity.”
“No way,” he replied. “NC breweries suck.”
So that was that.
The rep went on to tell me that he hadn’t had any “great” beers from North Carolina breweries, but that some of what he’d had was “good.”
Which apparently equates to “suck.”
Somewhere on the scale of Natty Light to Pliny/Dark Lord/Hunahpu did we all get lost? Are members of our beer community spoiled by certain tastes that they’re now jaded in their appreciation for beer?
I admit, there is one brewery in North Carolina that makes beers I simply don’t like. They’re also immensely popular. Just because I don’t like their beer doesn’t mean they suck.
But then again every beer drinker is supposed to have an opinion, right? It’s easy to see online, with this being among the approximately 234,092,840,232 beer blogs scattered across the Internet. But what’s with the hate from DC Beer Rep just because he didn’t love beer from a collection of breweries?
I turn to Donnie Darko, when good ol’ Kitty Farmer taught us that hear and love are the two core human emotions and everything goes to one end or the other:
But…
So what is it? If we love beer as a whole, what are we afraid of? Is fear holding us prisoner?
Yes, there are more breweries out there than ever before. Yes, that means there is a lot of good (and sometimes bad) beer. No, that doesn’t mean everything sucks.
In fact, between the good/bad or love/hate ends of the beer spectrum, there is a lot of damned fine beer that may not blow drinkers away, but it’s tasty and makes people happy.
… and that’s the point.
+Bryan Roth
“Don’t drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life.” — Jack Kerouac