What’s your craft beer personality?

I recently ran across this article by George Lenker breaking down 5 craft beer personality types: the beer geek, the beer populist, the beer gourmand, the know-it-all and the beer snob. Here’s a quick snippet of how Lenker describes each type:

The Beer Geek: They delight in talking about their favorite beers and rarely feel they need to come off (as) the smartest monkey in the brew zoo (even though they often are).

Beer Populists: While we are not obsessive, we really enjoy all types and styles of beer. Like beer geeks, we like to share our passion, but we do so by making craft beer seem accessible, which it is.

Beer Gourmands: These folks are casual craft beer drinkers (and) might even be seen enjoying a Michelob or a Budweiser once (in) a while.

The Know-It-All: These types are beer geeks with a flaw: They share their knowledge, but with an attitude that doesn’t encourage discussion.

Beer Snobs: Not only do they make beer aficionados like myself roll our eyes, they also turn off potential new craft beer lovers by their incessant need to dominate conversations.

I personally think labels like these are pretty lame, but Lenker does a pretty good job rounding them up. Where do you think you fall?

Read the full article here.

- Matt Pritchard

Video blog: pouring pilsner

Digging through my beer refrigerator, I noticed this lonely imperial pilsner from Dogfish Head Brewing Co. Perfect! Now for the spoiler. I see way too many people taking a big beer and pouring it in a pint glass. In order to keep this from sounding snobby, I’m going to illustrate this point with a video.

Watch this and then come back:

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Big beers are like big wines. You need to present the best parts of the beer (the head, the nose, the body, etc., etc.) in glassware that will accentuate them. Why? Because beer is much more complex than you might think. In fact, beer has more flavor compounds than wine, which makes sense if you realize that beer has many more ingredients than wine. The problem is that we often focus only on hops or malt. We forget about how different malt and hop flavors can show up at different temperatures and in glassware that helps bring them out. In the video you can see how the pilsner glass actually wedges the head in and makes it thick and pleasant on the lips. This pilsner was too big for a pils glass. Because of its imperial designation, it should have been served in a snifter-type glass, but for purposes of illustration I chose the pilsner glass.

So do I have to go out and buy all new glassware? No, absolutely not. You can find great glassware at places like Liquid Planet and other stores in town, but you can use your wine glasses for serving big beers, especially barley wines, imperial beers, dubbels and tripels.

Prost,

GG