Drink to Forget

When I'm trying a beer for the first time (or a film, album, game) I want to know as little as possible about it beforehand, so that I can decide if it's good without being influenced by whatever I've read. Sometimes I look it up on a review site to see if there's a general consensus on its goodness, but I should probably stop doing that. It's important to form my own opinion, and I don't like the notion that my taste is shaped mostly by what others have said. There are at least three things that make this really hard.

• The placebo effect: where outside forces convince you a certain thing will happen, and then when it doesn't you still tell yourself that it did

• Confirmation bias: where you want something specific to happen, so you seek out information that agrees with you and ignore information that contradicts you

• Echo chambers: where a cluster of people all say the same things, constantly reinforcing the belief that those things are true even if they're not

People like to think they have their own opinions, but they're all affected by these three things. If you realize this, you still probably don't know the full extent to which these things shape your opinions. So I like to approach new beers knowing full well that this stuff affects me, and simply seeing a positive review on a beer site is going to skew my opinion. For that matter, having tasted anything at all will skew my opinion... humans can't assign absolute value and can only decide how good something is in relation to something else. Nothing gets an objective, untainted review. 

One question I had when thinking about this: if everyone is susceptible to the bullet points above, and everyone is going to rate a beer (or album, etc) in relation to something else, why try to escape the placebo effect? What is the point of trying to rate something objectively when no one can possibly accomplish that, and when everyone is going to have a past experience that skews their opinion?

The main reason I attempt it is that I want to feel like I have original thoughts. Surely being aware of the existence of the placebo effect, confirmation bias, echo chambers, and the impossibility of being totally objective is some kind of advantage. The Dunning-Kruger effect says that anyone that thinks they may be incompetent, merely by having such a thought, is getting closer to competence. If you know that you're influenced by outside forces to a huge extent, you're less controlled by those forces than someone who has no clue.

Maybe I'm less prone to these issues since I'm aware of them, but isn't it futile to attempt escape? I don't think so, because there's one surefire way to dodge the trap of hearing something about a beer and being affected by that when you try it: being the first person to taste it... being the brewer. Anybody that makes stuff is familiar with the doubt, pessimism, and punishing self-imposed standards that come with submitting your work to public scrutiny. The brewers are probably under a reverse placebo effect where they think everything is worse than it actually is because they expect it not to live up to their vision.

Are there any inherently good beers, since everyone's opinion is the result of everyone else's opinion? Well no, because again, we can't evaluate anything unless it's in relation to something else. But imagining the brewer's first taste made me think the first person to experience something gets the best chance at objectivity. So pretend you're the first person ever tasting it... or give yourself the reverse placebo effect by assuming that no one knows what they're talking about and whatever you heard about the beer is probably wrong. This doubting attitude helps you to decide on your own if an over-hyped product is really any good, or if a low rated one is enduring unfair bias. In the scientific community this is called skepticism. It will improve your beer tasting, with the minor bonus of making you better at critical thinking. Of course that skill will be shot after enough beer.

Mandeville Beer Garden, my favorite joint in Sarasota

No Accounting for Taste

It's a good thing that BeerAdvocate aggregates many reviews of the same beer into one score, because it would be impossible to choose based on individual descriptions. The descriptions given by individuals on the site, by the site owners, and by the beer companies themselves, are convoluted and flowery to the point of meaninglessness. The language on these sites turns people off from great beer, much the same way music criticism cordons off some great music. It's not just snobbish, it's intentionally confusing, alienating, and impractical. The language of booze tasting does have two advantages over the language of music criticism: 1) it's not as full of factual inaccuracies and 2) the people writing about it seem to enjoy the subject.

As an experiment, I'm going to visit BeerAdvocate and grab the very first beer review I see. I'm writing this at 6:40pm on 8/29/2016, so if you seek this review out you'll notice it has the same timestamp.

What? From the squealer, it pours golden amber with a moderate off-white head. Pleasant in the nose, some grass. Very pleasant in the mouth, enjoyable overall! I've rated over 120 beers on this site, and I've never heard the term "squealer" referring to beer. "It pours"? The beer got out of the glass, grabbed another beer, and poured that into a glass? Is that some kind of cannibalism? I think by "it pours" you meant "it is". "Golden amber" means the same thing as "amber", and "moderate off-white head" means "foam". I get that in beer-speak foam is called "head", but is anyone expecting it to be a color other than white? What made him write "pleasant in the nose" instead of "smells good"? What made him write "pleasant in the mouth" instead of "tastes good"? What made him write "enjoyable overall" instead of "enjoyable"? You could argue that switching up adjectives makes writing more interesting, but do these switches make this review more interesting? They sure as hell don't make the review more informative.

Though I can't credit the writer because I don't know who it is, I remember some quote about beer connoisseurs "aping the language of wine" which sums up a vague annoyance I couldn't articulate. Did anybody notice the little ratings categories listed near the 3.79 score this dude gave? Does "look" refer to the bottle design, or the appearance of the beer inside? The website doesn't say. Why does the "overall" rating say 3.75 if the review's total score is 3.79? How is the overall rating of the beer different from... the overall rating of the beer?

We've got to take a break to acknowledge something about the act of rating beverages. I'm not talking about how every rating is inherently subjective and can't be trusted unless your taste is identical to the rater's taste, everyone knows that. I'm talking about the well documented fact that professional wine tasting is total bullshit, and it's been firmly established in these and many other studies that wine "experts" can barely distinguish between a white and a red in a blind taste test, much less the vintage or country of origin. There's a hilarious Wikipedia entry on The Judgment of Paris, a notorious 1976 Paris wine competition where blind testing was introduced for the first time. Parisian judges measured Bordeaux wines grown from centuries-old vines against young California reds, and California won every single category. By the way... the studies I linked to that debunk wine tasting? Published by the Journal of Wine Economics. The snobs themselves are the ones admitting that the snobbery is actually just fakery.

I bring this up because craft beer snobbery is the new wine snobbery, but it's way more widespread and annoying because of the intersection of two factors: everyone can afford great beer, and the craft beer explosion started at the same time as the social media explosion. So everyone has the ability to buy and write about great beer, but for some reason they choose to do it in a way that's disingenuous and not informative. Just for fun, I'm going to pick through the site real quick for some choice lines:

Its moonscape surface contains multiple bubbles of various sizes that create pits and craters as they burst.

Pineapple to grassy aroma with some small dank earthy tones and pine. Quite a bit diverse, slightly juicy sensing character, with mild malt sweetness.

Smooth and full in mouth, with a crisp, effervesced, and dry finish.

APPEARANCE: As I began to pour this beer it slowly came gurgling out like it was waiting for an invitation.

Explain to me how this is supposed to help someone determine whether they should buy this stuff. Somebody made the obvious suggestion that I stop reading these things if they annoy me, a suggestion that would help a number of craft beer fans I know. But BeerAdvocate is the biggest database of beer reviews on the internet, and you're not supposed to have to ignore huge databases of knowledge about a subject in order to enjoy that subject. What would be better is if the reviewers remember that reviews are supposed to relate a personal experience, and inform the reader. Most of these writers seem interested in writing a lot of words without doing either of those things. I doubt when this fellow poured Alesmith "Speedway Stout" that he thought "this beer seems like it's waiting for an invitation". And how is the speed of the pour a factor of appearance? And how does any of that tell you if the beer was good?

But check this guy out:
I am really amazed at the praise this beer seems to be getting from most reviewers. In fact, I disagree so much with this that I had to register an account and submit a review of my own. This beer is extremely sweet with a strangely artificial chocolate aroma and no bitterness, hops or roasted barley to balance it up. I would hesitate to describe this product as a stout or even a beer. I have tried many chocolate stouts in the past and liked every single one of them, but this one is just terrible. On top of that it was also expensive. 1.52/5

That review is negative, sure, but it's full of info and tells you exactly where he's coming from. No reason to spend a paragraph describing the foam on top. How about a positive one?
Drank at room temperature. Dark brown color, thick creamy brown head with strong retention, smell of dark/milk chocolate, nice carbonated mouth feel with medium body, sweet long lasting chocolate with a hint of cream soda flavor. Compared with Young's double chocolate. Smiths is hands down a better stout. Very tasty! 4.59/5

A review of the same beer but with the opposite reaction, using straightforward language and imagery accessible to anyone. He gives you the info and lets you draw your own conclusions, without using insane metaphors or trying to tell you how you should feel about it. The best part is when you compare the two, they basically say the same thing but lead to totally different scores due to the writers' personal tastes. All to say that if you're not describing an experience or providing information, your review is unnecessary.

Budgetary Exbeerimentation

I love buying beer at stores that let you make a custom six-pack from a selection of single beers. There's no faster way to learn about beer's countless styles and substyles, endless variations in alcohol content, flavorings, price, seasonal/limited releases and multi-brewery collaborations. Beyond the educational aspect, it allows the most variety since one sixer equals six different experiences. Grocery stores rarely cater to this style of buying, so I hunt for specialty shops with the largest possible selection of singles.

This is the most expensive and inefficient way to buy beer, since as with most other products, buying a larger quantity of one product results in a lower price per ounce. The excellent Founder's "Breakfast Stout" is $3.50 per bottle at Total Wine and Spirits, but only $12.00 for a four-pack. That's 15% less per beer, which compounds quickly since I make weekly trips to buy custom six-packs. If you drank one a day for a month (monotonous, but a delicious monotony) you'd spend $108.50... but for some reason, introducing a four-compartment cardboard sleeve reduces that price to $92.00.

Depending on your philosophy, the time cost is even worse. It takes time and mental stamina to scan hundreds of individual labels, especially since good stores put helpful info cards under each beer (more reading). The clock ticks while you juggle all that information, running dozens of tiny cost-benefit analyses in an attempt to whittle the store's inventory into only six choices. And the trip repeats every week, in my 2004 Mustang that's about 60 cents and ten minutes per trip, for a cost of $2.40, 40 minutes, and a gallon of gas monthly.

There's got to be a way for me to learn about beer and have a ton of variety without wasting so much time and money. After weeks of the custom six-pack method, I discovered the swanky craft beer "bomber" area of Total Wine. A bomber is a 22oz bottle instead of the usual 12oz, meaning you get almost two beers per bottle, plus breweries often release their craftiest (and rarest) beers in this format - which means more education. Great! So this $10.00 bomber of tasty Southern Tier "Crème Brulée" stout is only 45 cents an ounce, and since the aforementioned Founder's is only 29 cent per ounce for a single beer, that means buying bombers is 1.5 times as expensive! Wait... what was I trying to do again?

• Goal: drink a large variety of beer for both educational and entertainment purposes, and waste less time and money.
• Obstacles: the cheapest buying method is the least educational and varied, and the most educational/varied method is the most expensive and time consuming.

An easy improvement is to buy for the whole month in one trip, which automatically cuts shopping time in-store, and driving costs (both time and money) down to 25% of the original amount. Doing all the shopping in one trip also means I get to buy more at one time, which exposed an incredibly obvious solution that would never have come to me if I were buying a single six-pack: buy multiple six-packs and rotate them for variety.

The best beers come in 22oz bombers at around $10.00, but the best six-packs are about the same price, for triple the servings (six beers versus two servings per bomber). For $50.00, I could grab five top-notch six-packs (30 servings) and have a great beer every day, rotating them to revisit the same beer only once every five days. Since a bomber has 1/3 the servings as a six-pack, it would cost three times as much to buy a month's supply: $150.

According to my records, I spent $153.00 on craft beer last month (I recommend Mint.com for budget tracking), so these numbers aren't just theoretical. Eventually I settled on a compromise:

• Two good six-packs to rotate at $10 each (running total: $20, twelve servings)
• Two excellent four-packs to rotate at $10 each (running total: $40, twenty servings)
• Three excellent bombers at $10 each (running total: $70, twenty-six servings)
• Five random weird singles at around $3.00 each (final total: $85, thirty-one servings)

By sacrificing a little variety, but no quality, I was able to cut the month's beer expenses by 43%, while cutting gas and time costs by 75%. It's always nice to save money, but it's beyond nice to spend less time at the store. I'm going to see what other areas of my life would benefit from the "do more in one trip" method, remembering that the benefits can extend beyond saving money.

Partial picture of the haul (click to enlarge)