Microbrews

A buddy of mine proclaimed recently that he much preferred a Miller Lite to any microbrew.

There seems to be a big divide amongst beer drinkers, the one side drinks beer because they like beer, sports and chicks while the other side has tried to turn having a cold one into some opportunity for a bunch of snobs to try to top one-another with the obscurity of the beers they have had.. Basically it becomes a battle between those amongst us who can appreciate a cold beer and the bourgeois who like the whole world to know they really can dissect the complex layers of taste in beer.

Now I'm not saying all MicroBrews suck but I am saying that there is this snobby mentality around them whose defenders liken an affinity for Miller Lite as a character flaw. It's to the point that even criticizing a beer makes you feel like you've told a room full of art-historian snobs that the Mona Lisa isn't that good. God forbid you knock one of these things, you are after-all asked to pay for them.

Now I fully agree that there are some good brews and breweries but the fast majority, like the vast majority of struggling artist and local bands for example, kind of suck. There is a reason there are thousands of galleries who nobody goes to, or thousands of bands who record songs that nobody listens to. Now I realize that Guns N Roses came from the local LA scene but so did Thundormuffin and nobody wears their shirts.

I know everybody embraces microbrews for their combination of variety, texture and alcoholic content and as a person who himself works for a small company I do appreciate the entrepreneurial of these brewers to bring beers to the market but at some point I feel like their staffs are so small they forgot to add somebody to handle quality control..

As for the variety I see the appeal in Microbrews because they can offer a lot of choice whether it's a Milk Stout, a Belgian wheat or some version of an IPA. The issue isn't that you offer 6 beer types it's that you offer 6 different shitty beers.

As for the taste: nine out of ten times, I sit bellied-up at a bar and try a microbrew I find it to be a rip-off of something commercial available except very often I find the microbrews to be more flat. I know they all lay claim to the best hops and malts and yeasts but honestly a lot of them taste like you are drinking a yeast infection.

What I find is that a lot of these places can seem to have one pretty good beer, like their Belgian Wheat for example but then they have a bland pilsner or a milk-stout which tastes like somebody but out a cigarette in it. Not everyone sucks, just the vast majority of them.

And as for the alcoholic content, I feel like this is just another game of whose got the bigger dick. If I want to get sloshed, I can do it drinking Jack and not feel full. If alcohol content is so important why aren't you drinking moonshine? Probably because like the CopperKettle's IPA, Moonshine tastes like it was filtered through a homeless guy's ahole.

So I can't decide what is worse: feeling shunned when I dare speak ill of a Microbrew or feeling like somebody pumped by stomach full of unfiltered sewage when I am done with one of these things.
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