The New York Times
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
pgs D1&D6
The Story
The Summary: Beer is growing up, from a frat boy guzzle to sophisticated sip, two Boston brothers are taking a lead in the revolution.
Curious, I traveled to the Boston area last week to meet the Alströms, whose Web site beeradvocate.com has become a lightning rod for the pent-up passions of beer lovers everywhere.
They started it 10 years ago, posting notes on beers they enjoyed or despised. Now it is a full-featured site with news, essays on beer history and styles, forums and voluminous notes on brews from around the world. The Alströms say they have more than 100,000 members. Reversing the usual direction of print to Web, they’ve begun publishing Beer Advocate magazine, a glossy monthly about beer and beer culture.
I've often described myself as a beer girl. "Spirits" have never been my thing, wine is alright, mixed drinks are normally to girly to too "college." There's something about a good beer. It can be -26F outside, but a cold beer is wonderful with a hot meal. I love beer with almost anything cooked on the grill. It's great with steak or chicken or fish or... well, you get the idea.
In fact, both are far more mild-mannered and thoughtful than they might appear online. In person, Respect Beer is neither a demand nor a request but a reasonable approach to a beverage that, given a chance, offers the same sort of pleasure and conviviality as a good glass of wine. But it needs the chance.
“I go to a really high-end restaurant, and they come out with a really nice wine list and a book of cocktails, but the beer list is just something the waitress recites and they’re all awful,” Todd said. Jason adds, “That really disturbs me. But some have caught on and they really get it.”
Beer has been the alcoholic beverage of lower class males, that's just that. With beers like Natty Light for less than $10/case, it almost deserves it. Beer has this cheap aura about it. But not all beers are cheap. In fact, I've come to live by "Life's too short to drink cheap beer." I bought a twelve pack of Miller Lite before Christmas break, I gave 6 to my uncle at Christmas, there are still four in my fridge. I try to give them away when people come over, it doesn't work. I might make beer cheese soup one of these days.
“One of our main goals is trying to raise the image of beer as a whole and bring back the beer culture,” Todd said. “We had a beer culture but Prohibition kind of reset the button.”
The popular image of beer drinkers has always been the industry’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The slobbering yahoos at the football game with the bare chests and painted faces; the snarling mud wrestlers battling over “tastes great, less filling,” and the usual array of good ol’ frat house antics are all representations from the mass-market beer industry itself, which has succeeded by aiming low. The cost has been respect, and the result has been a decades-long battle to win it back.
Beer was the first alcohol to come back after prohibition ended, during the Great Depression. Everyone was poor back then. From then on it was the alcohol of the commoner. With that came the slob and the college oafs.
While fraternity behavior is largely associated with beer drinking, serious beer lovers have spent years on the outside of polite society.
Without the pastoral mystique that has been appropriated by wine producers or the suave, sophisticated imagery of the wine drinker, beer lovers have largely retreated to the antistyle precincts associated with such proverbial social outcasts as computer nerds and science fiction fanatics. Bizarre facial hair, unflattering T-shirts and strange headgear are standard equipment among beer geeks.
I know plenty of people who can have a beer or two after work, or with supper. It's here that the normal people and the beer geeks collide. The middle-class man who comes home to a can of Bud Light might be introduced to Sam Adams, and from there become more exploritory with their selections at the liquor store, exchanging quantity for quality.
Everyone can be a bit of a beer freak. It doesn't mean you have to be a complete snob, just be more open. Don't worry about ratings on websites so much, drink what you like. If you like Miller Lite, drink it. I've found that most beer snobs like dark beer. I don't like bitter, dark beer. I'm sorry. My favorite is Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss Bier. It gets horrible ratings, but it's popular here.
Eat, drink, and be merry.
I'm gonna go get a beer.
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