Discussed in this Post:

• Beer Snobs

• Beer Nerds

• Bud Light Bros and Bud-onlys (elsewhere conflated as IODB’s)

• Judging

• David Foster Wallace

As noted, we didn’t get the Bollard gig. Here’s the first offering from their new beer columnist: https://thebollard.com/2019/03/31/beery/

During the composition of our “First Column,” Jeff composed a long digression that we later edited out based on our analysis of past Bollard beer columns. Here it is:

Are we beer snobs?  I don’t think so. What is a beer snob anyway?  A snob feels superior to others based on some perceived social or moral hierarchy.  So maybe there are some craft beer drinkers who look down on macro-beer drinkers, but I think mainly the beer fan tent is a big tent full of live-and-let-live types.  

Shit, I have to come off that a little.  Here I sit in my free Sculpin IPA T-shirt, but I can’t help questioning the judgment of my neighbor with the “dillydilly” vanity license plate.  Still, if I knew him (it has to be a him, right? And young, or clinging to youth when he should gracefully accept being over forty and realize that all those Bud Lights don’t go well with his BPH), I wouldn’t mock him to his face; that might only be sour grapes that he can afford a way nicer car than I can, and a vanity plate, and is passionate enough about something to identify that strongly with it.  

Some of my best friends drink Bud Light.  Some of them have grown to like craft beers, but often they go back to the Bud Light for sessions with their college friends, keeping their limited-release crowlers hidden for another time.

Those guys might be friends with people who’d go to the Beer and Beard Festival I saw a poster for.  I thought, “I have a beard, I like beer, I have plaid shirts, too.” But I can’t imagine myself at at that festival: a 60/40 mix of skinny jeans with spandex to Carharts, trucker caps and Neff toques, talk about how  some ale is dank, another is crushable intermingled with beard oil discussions.

But these beer and beard fans aren’t snobs, it’s my perception of them that inspires some kind of reactionary take.  “None of these are as good as Geary’s Pale Ale.” I’m not going “Bud only,” but I see where those guys are coming from.

Inside our big beer tent we have not snobs, but overlapping circles (and various degrees) of beer nerd groups.  

Thinking about beer nerd groups, and skinny jean urban lumberjacks, and Bud Light Bros, and judgment reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s hilarious and complex  essay “Tense Present.”

People really do "judge" one another according to their use of language: Constantly. Of course, people judge one another on the basis of all kinds of things- - weight, scent, physiognomy, occupation, make of, vehicle-and, again, doubtless it's all terribly complicated and occupies whole battalions of sociolinguists. But it's clear that at least one component of all this interpersonal semantic judging involves acceptance, meaning not some touchy-feely emotional affirmation but actual acceptance or rejection of somebody's bid to be, regarded as a peer, a member of somebody else's collective or community or Group.

So the Bud-onlys proclaim membership in one group by rejection of  all “IPA’s,” refusing even to acknowledge that there are multiple types of craft beers, while urban lumberjacks announce their inner circle status by having tried the newest release from the nanoest brewery before you could.

We have nothing to say to the Bud-onlys, because part of their ethos is that beer occupies their hands, mouths, bellies, but not minds.  And we probably have nothing to say to the innermost of the innermost beer nerds because they already know it. But we approach beer in the most capital-D democratic way we can, and if you do too, that is, if you like to drink it and think about it and talk about it, but mostly drink it, then we might have something to say to you, and you to us.