Following my recent judging at the World Beer Awards, a family member commented on a Facebook post of mine from the awards. His comments were “Sorry mate, but I don’t get how you can like a beer that you don’t like”
My response was as follows “well they weren’t being judged on whether we liked them or not. They were judged on how well they were made and if they were true to style. Each beer has a set of guidelines and each flight was judged accordingly, even if they weren’t to our taste”
That’s all well and good, but when it comes to buying our own beer, we’re constantly judging them before we’ve even tried them, which is wrong. I’m even guilty of doing this.
Reading through the list of Country Winners on the train home from judging, I was amazed at some of the beers that were included. What amazed me was that I’d seen some of these beers on the supermarket shelf and that I’d not bought them, because I’d judged them. I’d never bought them, but yet I’d seen them, judged them and ultimately chosen to not buy them, which is wrong, so wrong.
How can you judge a beer when you haven’t even tried it? We all do it though, every time we go into the bottle shop or supermarket, we do it. We’re not just choosing the beers we’d like to drink, we’re judging those we’re not sure about or the ones we feel we don’t want. These are the beers that lose out, or rather, we lose out because we’ve judged that they are not worth purchasing. Which again is wrong.
They may not all be to our taste, or at least we believe they’re not, or they could be from one of those breweries that the craft lot don’t buy from, but, they are well made and are perfect exhibitions of the brewers skills. But, none of this quality matters, as we’ve already judged it, made our minds up and bought something else. Something that may be unsatisfactory, but then everyone else is drinking it so it’s fine.
I’m not cool with that. It doesn’t matter what everyone else is drinking, or what they’re saying about what they’re drinking.
“Yeah but HopHead69 on Instagram is drinking this and he says it’s the bomb”
My mum always used to say “if he decided to jump off a cliff, would you do it too?”
No you wouldn’t.
Buy something different, buy something you’ve never thought of buying before, or better still, buy one of those beers you’ve previously dismissed and don’t judge it until you’ve tasted it. You could be surprised.
Make up your own mind. Judge beer for yourself and don’t always be influenced by others. Drink something different, enjoy it, and be proud of it.
You are your own person and you are your own beer buyer.
Elstons Beer Blog 