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.