Friday Beer Blogging: Beer Snob Edition

Just because I do a weekly feature on beer doesn't mean, a) that I have any taste, and b) that I know what I'm talking about. I thought perhaps I should change that and become better informed. However, I prefer drinking beer to leaning anything about it, so I looked for a quick and easy way to get educated. But where to get that down and dirty course on beer. Ah yes, my old friend Modern Drunkard Magazine! I looked into it and sure enough, they have an article in the archives on how to be a beer snob. Brilliant! Note: I inserted all of the pictures here and they were not part of the original MDM article.

They start out with a bit of history:

While wine snobs have blighted the earth for thousands of years (you can bet there was at least one guy curling his lip at the vintage of Jesus’ first and best miracle), beer snobbery is a relatively young art, especially in the U.S.

This is because every beer in the country once tasted exactly the same. Oh sure, there were Bud lovers and MGD aficionados who would swear they could tell the difference, but if you gave them a blind taste test, you’d soon discover they’d just keep asking for another “test taste” until there wasn’t any beer left and they were passed out on your sofa.
Furthermore, beer was considered the balm of the common man, it was not something you swirled in a glass and judged by its “nose.” It was something you swilled from a plastic cup and sometimes shot through your nose.

Then the microbrewery revolution swept the country and soon every abandoned firehouse, bank and shoe factory was outfitted with a vat and turning out every possible form and flavor of beer you could imagine, and some you would rather not.

It was perfectly natural then, with so many different beers to choose from, that a learned cadre of beer experts would appear to explain to the unsophisticated masses what is “good beer” and what “has the nose and character of a harbor-town harlot with a penchant for walking into walls caked with manure.” Thus arrived the beer snob.

They move on to such things as comparing and contrasting beer snobs with beer snobs. For example, did you know:

The dress is casual.
Wine snobs have a strict dress code involving turtlenecks, glasses designed to sit on the end of one's nose and silk scarves, but a beer snob can pretty much dress anyway he likes. Aside from the snooty expression, a typical beer snob is nearly indistinguishable from your least favorite brother-in-law.

or

Enthusiasm and relish is more important than experience and research.
When it comes to rating beers, you don’t need to be able to identify the vintage or know which field the hops were grown in. This would just confuse you. Neither do you need to attend mundane festivals, read a bunch of dreary books or even sample a lot of different beers. All you need is a big helping of enthusiasm and relish, and by that I mean sarcasm and snootiness.

Particularly helpful are the definitions of the various kinds of beer. For example:

export: this is a type of beer so awful the locals refuse to drink it, so the brewery ships it off to foreigners who don’t know any better.

and

fruit: these flavored beers were introduced to appeal to women and certain men who get very defensive when you inform them they are plainly homosexual.

Very informative! After reading the whole article (there's much more) I really do feel like a beer snob now.

Have a happy weekend and enjoy your ignorance and lack of sophistication regarding all things beer.