Are beer geeks really "dangerous extremophiles"?

Yes, I see some of his points as very valid, but damm I hate being so completely misunderstood.

http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/why-extremophiles-are-a-danger-to-us-all/

Further discussion on Kens Facebook profile:

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/0.kmweaver.0/posts/136999069698185

Now let me get this straight. The guy who is obsessed with beer and beer culture from 200-400 years ago thinks WE are out of touch with the modern beer drinker???? Mr. Pot meet Mr. Kettle.

The UK list is a fucking joke, I’ll give him that!

Plus he has a lot of valid points, but to dismiss the whole site as he does is just silly; there is some great content on RB and, although I totally agree with his general thrust that to get anywhere on RB a brew must be 8+, have imperial in the name and have been in some random cask for ten minutes, he’s an old-fashioned UK beer writer so doesn’t really understand the online beer scene that well.

He’s probably correct in saying that few drinkers in the "real world" care much about the RB lists. Any more than they care about witterings in the blogosphere.

Now that’s a steaming pile of an article.

If we’re going to go with blanket statements, then surely there is nothing more extreme than the English beer drinker, who typically drinks only one brand of beer. English beer aficionados might drink two or three styles of beer. The hardcore English ticker will sample 15,000 examples of the same type of beer. And we’re extreme?

But if holding such views makes one feel good enough about oneself to rag on an entire website’s worth of diverse people, well, whatever works. English beer snobs like this guy seem perpetually in a dick-measuring contest over who is the most authentic beer drinker, and surely such a person couldn’t possibly be from the colonies, or worse yet rating beers on the Internet. Especially not if they like imperial stouts. There is only one proper way to enjoy beer, right? In a session, in an English pub, on cask. Everything else is bullshit, right? That is the underlying tone here.

And if you’re going to write a rant, it would help to have an iota of logical consistency. You can’t decry an emphasis on big beer over session beer as indicating a lack of taste and then complain that FES is rated below Guinness Draught in the same article. Aside from being tangential, it directly contradicts the entire f’n argument.

You can’t declare a website to be full of extremists and then piss on the one vote for something favoured by the masses. Guinness made the cut specifically because lots of people like it. We have well north of 100,000 members here, and about 1500 hardcore members. Those other people vote, too, and most of them are just everyday beer lovers. Guess what - everyday beer lovers like Guinness. Don’t trust me, it’s right there in Diageo’s annual report. Millions of people like Guinness. I’m not making this up.

RB Best is about the numbers, not the optics. And that is something lost on a surprising number of people. You don’t tweak the results to make it look prettier. If that was the case it would be Joe Tucker’s Best, not Ratebeer’s Best. The chips fall where they fall. Hand-wringing about the optics is for self-appointed experts and dick-measuring, more-authentic-beer-drinker-than-you types.

Originally posted by Oakes
Now that’s a steaming pile of an article.

If we’re going to go with blanket statements, then surely there is nothing more extreme than the English beer drinker, who typically drinks only one brand of beer. English beer aficionados might drink two or three styles of beer. The hardcore English ticker will sample 15,000 examples of the same type of beer. And we’re extreme?

But if holding such views makes one feel good enough about oneself to rag on an entire website’s worth of diverse people, well, whatever works. English beer snobs like this guy seem perpetually in a dick-measuring contest over who is the most authentic beer drinker, and surely such a person couldn’t possibly be from the colonies, or worse yet rating beers on the Internet. Especially not if they like imperial stouts. There is only one proper way to enjoy beer, right? In a session, in an English pub, on cask. Everything else is bullshit, right? That is the underlying tone here.

And if you’re going to write a rant, it would help to have an iota of logical consistency. You can’t decry an emphasis on big beer over session beer as indicating a lack of taste and then complain that FES is rated below Guinness Draught in the same article. Aside from being tangential, it directly contradicts the entire f’n argument.

You can’t declare a website to be full of extremists and then piss on the one vote for something favoured by the masses. Guinness made the cut specifically because lots of people like it. We have well north of 100,000 members here, and about 1500 hardcore members. Those other people vote, too, and most of them are just everyday beer lovers. Guess what - everyday beer lovers like Guinness. Don’t trust me, it’s right there in Diageo’s annual report. Millions of people like Guinness. I’m not making this up.

RB Best is about the numbers, not the optics. And that is something lost on a surprising number of people. You don’t tweak the results to make it look prettier. If that was the case it would be Joe Tucker’s Best, not Ratebeer’s Best. The chips fall where they fall. Hand-wringing about the optics is for self-appointed experts and dick-measuring, more-authentic-beer-drinker-than-you types.

There are no beer awards decided by a larger group of experienced beer drinkers. But obviously our scoring system favours bigger beers.
It’s biased. All beer awards are biased. The World Beer Cup and the like is biased towards style guidelines. That’s just another kind of specific scoring system.


But I’d much rather discuss the core of the rant, than just take it as an attack on Ratebeer. What signal does it send to mainstream media and the public when we declare that the best beers in the world are strong, barrel aged imperial stouts?


Among the geekiest of beer geeks (The Danish crew) I don’t feel that these are necessarily our favourite beers to drink, they are just scoring consistently high in our scoring system.

We go through this every year - I don’t understand why people have such a tough time with the concept. These are aggregate ratings - they aren’t necessarily the best beers for any individual, they’re the best beers on average. We have a few folks who actively love these types of intense beers, but if you lok at any individual’s top 10 list, very fee look like the ratebeer top ten. That distinction is lost on most of the people who get pissed off every year. Martyn does a lot of great work and I really enjoy reading his work, but we are who we are. Our system rewards beers that are novel, beers that are intense, and beers that are new, but anyone who follows the site knows that.

Josh’s point is that the numbers are the numbers - we don’t have to apologize for them. They are what they are - but to write off the site because of what is (for most of us anyway), a very small part of what we do is myopic at best, and downright idiotic at worst. That seems to be what Martyn does in his rant - I’d hate to think that i’d do the same thing to anyone due to a disagreement about some tangential issue, but maybe that’s just me.

Originally posted by chriso
He’s probably correct in saying that few drinkers in the "real world" care much about the RB lists. Any more than they care about witterings in the blogosphere.

Originally posted by maeib

Originally posted by chriso
He’s probably correct in saying that few drinkers in the "real world" care much about the RB lists. Any more than they care about witterings in the blogosphere.

Take a bow Chris. Great post

How do I always get involved in these things?

I foolishly imagined Martyn and I were having a real conversation.