Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Musical Analogy

I've seen a number of beer/music analogies, but mine includes wine and spirits:

-Wine is classical music. Elegant, intricate and carefully-crafted. The culture and the products themselves can be somewhat inaccessible to the uninitiated.
-Spirits can all be lumped together as 'Tom Waits'. Relatively narrow but massively deep. If you can get past the burning, there's a wealth of treasure underneath.
-Industrial light lager is the Top 40. Very well-produced, but designed to appeal to the widest possible consumer base.
-Craft beer is everything else, and not just within the confines of western music. Some is truly good, some is truly bad, and a lot is simply misunderstood. Regardless, the variety is staggering. If you want honest expression, craft beer can touch your soul. If you're a pretentious snob, craft beer has a scene for you to own. If you like it heavy, light, loud, quiet, fast or slow - craft beer does it all.

This list begs the question "what is craft beer?" I'm not going to answer that.

1 comment:

Shane said...

Craft beer is jazz. While drawn from the background of the world, only in America could you take so many diverse backgrounds and styles, mix them together (usually with an eye to break old conventions) and come out with a brand new item; distinct, high quality, different than what came before it but still there is an acknowledgment of its roots.

(Today was a brew day. Could you tell?)