TRPG General Chat

5:00 PM

I keep getting invited to micro brew places for a meet up and end up with beer that is awful. I like the social meet ups, but the I don't pretend the beer is any good. Most of it isn't. Sturgeon's law applies doubly to beer in micro brews. My general feeling is "sorry, pal, you aren't the next Sam Adams." And now beer stores ...

Fill their shelves with pretentious and bad micro brew, making it harder to find drinkable beer. In the process, they stop carrying some nice imports like Sapporo, a variety of German beers and lagers, and some of the better English ales. I thank Texas for still having Shiner around ... but even t hey are falling prey to 'bad beer sells, let's make some!'

Rant over, and I count as a blessing the fact that rye whiskey has made a comeback.

GreySage

@KorvinStarmast Remember, almost all "microbrews" are actually owned by the same giant beer companies. They just realized that people think "Looks like a small business = good quality".

Adam

5:16 PM

@KorvinStarmast There was a skit I remember seeing where a guy was talking about the beers he liked with one of his friends and his friend was a caricature beer snob, drinking nothing but double/triple/quadruple IPAs and bragging about how his favorite beers are all crazy bitter. I didn't realize that people had standard units for beer bitterness till I saw that skit.

godskook

5:27 PM

@KorvinStarmast, as someone with an unusual pallette, I find the vast majority of "normal" beers to be sub-par swill that causes me to wonder why people drink them. And while my selection of micro-brews hasn't been much better, its at least been slightly better. In other words, put the Corona, Miller, Bud, and PBR away, and bring out the Micro Brews, at least they're trying to taste good.

NautArch

The whole IPA race to cover flavor with hops is bizarre

That I don't really get

But I've had a few sips/spits or gose and sours that are really yummy

Adam

@NautArch As I understood it, IPAs originally had more hops in them out of necessity. The extra hops and bittering agents helped act as a preservative while the beer was exported. Other beers would just spoil on the trip. How that turned into a race for the most bitter beer ever in modernity, I don't know.

godskook

5:47 PM

Partially probably because some people(not me) actually like that kind of flavor.

Yuuki

6:05 PM

I wonder how much watching movie analysis like Lessons From The Screenplay would help with DMing.

@KorvinStarmast Yeah, I'm not a fan of IPAs although I do like the occasional stout.

NautArch

@Adam that's exactly right. The trip to India was long and hot. Cover up that spoiled beer taste!

KorvinStarmast

6:21 PM

@Yuuki Our local microbrew that I will now and again go to after work has a passable porter, and a decent stout. All else is rubbish, since the one drinkable lager they had they don't make anymore. On a hot day, I rarely care for a porter. On a cool afternoon, yeah.

On the bright side, all of these microbrews does mean more people are getting to live the dream of running their own business and making their own beer. So that's a plus.

@godskook godskook, I broke into beer drinking in the 70's with Bud, PBR, Old Milwaukee, and the occasional exotic like Carta Blanca. I discovered real ale in the UK in the 80's, and fell in love with a proper pint then. Plenty of time enjoying German beer purity laws in Germany drinking German beer.

Some days, a bud suffices. (Usually a hot day with a cold bud). If I am drinking a beer to sip and savor, Guinness and some of the richer, heavier concoctions suffice. (Boddington's is one such). Those beers don't try to do too much.

godskook

As one not familiar with German Purity Laws, huh?

Yuuki

Despite being similar shapes, the vuvuzela is the opposite of Gabriel's Horn: finite surface area but with infinite volume.

@godskook Basically WWII.

KorvinStarmast

if you don't meet certain standards, you are not permitted to make beer in Germany. They take their beer seriously, and the product shows. :)

godskook

@Yuuki, different set of laws, I'm sure :P

Yuuki

@godskook :P

nwp

6:27 PM

@KorvinStarmast That's a very favorable interpretation. A less favorable interpretation is that it destroys competition and innovation by only allowing 4 ingredients.

KorvinStarmast

nwp, I am not sure if you are on board with the elegance of simplicity, but I appreciate it. Likewise with la pizza vera, a la Naples. only a very few places can qualify for the actual Pizzeria Napolitana mark, and there's a reason for it. Adherence to strict formula and quality standards.

One of the few that does that is Dough, in San Antonio. They do the real thing.

@nwp Further that point, the Germans are protecting their national reputation as quality beer makers. That was a hard earned rep, and IMO they are smart not to open that rep to any old "well, I am German and it's beer" enterprise. Good Reputation IRL is so easily lost, and so hard to earn.

With a lot of the micro brews, I feel like I am getting the alpha version of software. For the prices they charge, no thanks. Rather have a glass of water.

nwp

I'm not a fan of "national reputation". Way too many people to do any reasonable quality assurance. And the law doesn't even assure quality, it just limits the ingredients to what you are allowed to call beer. And you can brew some really bad stuff with those ingredients.

KorvinStarmast

@nwp You can, but you'll go out of business. When I am in Germany and order a beer, I have a fair expectation of a good glass or stein of beer. (Same if I buy a case of Spaten).

nwp

@KorvinStarmast And the national reputation does nothing to stop you, hence it is every brewery on its own. So you may as well not have the law.

And then there is this stuff which I like much more than any beer. It would probably count as beer if it wasn't illegal to call it that.

KorvinStarmast

@nwp I'll suggest to you that the non performers are cooked in a stew of their own making rather quickly. ;)

Berliner Kindl and Schultheiss are the two beers I remember best from living in Germany as a kid; Was trinken wir? Schultheiss Bier!

nwp

6:43 PM

I liked drinking kozel in czechia. Might have been a combination with the sweet food they have.

KorvinStarmast

My chance to travel there went "poof" back in 97, and the few times we have tried to travel to Europe again have all gone south. Some day, I'll visit Prague and various other places nearby. Bucket list, but for the moments, boycott airlines unless forced to travel.

Hmm, I'll see if my local high end alcohol/beer place (Specs) had Kozel. Not familiar, but I've come to enjoy Pilsners more over the years.

godskook

@nwp, technically, if the law doesn't prohibit the serving of "non-beer" beers, then all the law is doing is restricting language, not commerce.

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