What is a focused beer?

Is focus simplicity or complexity? Can it be both? Is it one dominant flavor with others supporting (or not) or synergy of flavors with nothing dominating?



This was what I spent part of the day contemplating.



Focus, to me, means understanding your ingredients and knowing how they are best used. It’s sort of like the overused concept of terroir in wine making. To me, terroir isn’t a "sense of place", but rather a "knowledge of ingredients".



I don’t think that there is such a thing as a bad ingredient (within reason, obviously), just ingredients looking for their proper application. That being said, I do believe that there are a great deal of ingredients that I’ll never use in my beers again. For no other reason that after repetitive usage, they just didn’t fit well into my brewing style. This doesn’t necessarily mean nobody else should use them, it just means that I’m probably not going to.



My hope for every beer that I brew is that it is straight-forward and well-crafted whether it is simple or complex. That it is a harmonious expression of the constituent ingredients. Everything in balance. That balance may mean that some aromas and flavor are in the background while others take the spotlight, but it doesn’t mean those others should be impossible to taste or unappreciated.



What is focus to you?



Better yet, what qualities do you want your beers to have?

To me focus means your beer has a cohesive theme to its flavor profile and not disjointed/muddled/conflicting flavors. Doesn’t necessarily mean simple, complexity should come off as depth of flavor that supports the main theme vs individual layers of flavors that each fight for attention. The beer as a whole should be greater than a sum of its parts.

Example of a focused beer: Widmer Drifter (RIP) - the use of caramel malts coupled with nelson sauvin and summit hops created a flavor profile similar to strawberries - at least to my palate. If you tried real hard to concentrate on picking each individual ingredient out, yeah, you could, but taken as a whole, those ingredients all supported each other in an unique, focused flavor.

Example of a non focused beer: Most DFH beers ;-) But in particular I noticed early on in my craft beer days that Raison d’etre is a disjointed mess of a beer. The malt, hops, and added flavoring just seemed separate from each other and all vying for your attention equally. Nothing tied it together, it is just a sum of its parts.

Finding the right combination of ingredients and amounts of those ingredients to make something unique, flavorful, and focused is what craft beer is to me. Anyone can throw ingredients together and come up with a complex and flavorful beer, masters of the craft create something much more through experience, knowledge, and trial and error, repeating and tweeking a recipe until it is exactly the flavor profile the brewer wants it to be. Unfortunately the prior seems to be dominating in craft beer geek and brewer circles.

Note to self: RB homebrewers don’t care about making great beer

Focused beer: a clear, insightful concept flawlessly executed.

Aside from your snarky comment above, I agree with pretty much everything in your OP.

"Focused" can be a very subjective term. Are you focused on showcasing a single hop or malt, or creating an impy stout that assaults the senses, or a pleasant, drinkable session beer…. the list goes on. Personally, I like trying to figure out what the brewer was going for on a particular beer. When I can figure that out and appreciate it… that’s a focused beer. If I’m left confused about what the thought process was in creating the beer… I’m left a bit cold.

My mood and circumstances determine what kind of beer I’m interested in at the moment. Like right now I’m totally geeking out over lagers. Any lager really, pils, dunkel, bock. I’m insane about them because I just brewed my first Traditional Bock, and I’m excited about how it’s going to turn out. A few weeks from now, I may be on to something else. The one constant in my appreciation for beer is what you call "focus". I need to be able to figure out what the brewer was going for, even if it’s not to my tastes.

Tight, not sloppy, integrated, can definitely be singular. I think its unusual for a beer to really achieve this.

Originally posted by JAXSON
I think its unusual for a beer to really achieve this.

I like to play with adjuncts. I love to try to recreate beers that were brewed 100s or 1000s of years ago. I enjoy exploring the last remnants of indigenous brewing techniques still employed in small pockets throughout the world.

I don’t know if that is what you would consider focused, but I can say that I probably do not homebrew for the reasons many others here do.

Originally posted by HornyDevil
Note to self: RB homebrewers don’t care about making great beer

Originally posted by bitbucket

Originally posted by HornyDevil
Note to self: RB homebrewers don’t care about making great beer

It’s probably fair to say they don’t check the forums obsessively for your posts.

The words "focused beer" by themselves don’t mean anything to me. It’s a meaningless phrase like "quality is job 1" or "support our troops." Support them financially? Philosophically? Emotionally? Support them as human beings? Support their mission?

If you say hop-focused or malt-focused, now we have something to talk about.

Maybe we should just stick to whalez, rarez, sourz, hoppies, bbl aging, ticking, and trading. Then we could have a real discussion about the quality of craft brewing in the US.