Nothing feeds discussion like Top 100 lists

Over at Zythophile, a quality beer blog that focuses largely on the history of British beers and styles, there is a good post discussing the latest RateBeer Top 100 List, which is dominated by imperial stouts and double IPAs, along with some Trappist ales. From the post:

the first problem is that more normal drinkers, if they see that list, are going to look at it and get an utterly distorted and entirely false idea of what really great beer is all about. It’s like telling people that the best dishes available in restaurants are all vindaloo curries, or the best bands in the world only come from the different varieties of metal. And that won’t encourage them at all to explore the huge variety of other fantastic beers that are available.

Mind you, I have no issue with imperial stouts, double IPAs, vindaloo or extreme metal. However, there are many, many less extreme pleasures to be had in the worlds of beer, food and music. And while I’ve had about thirty of that top 100, only two of those are beers I’d consider to be “anytime” beers*, meaning the sort of beers I would want in the fridge or on tap at any moment when I happened to think “Hey, I want to have a beer!” or “Hey, I want to have another beer!!”

Martha and I frequently talk about correcting for the double IPA/imperial stout bias of reviewers on places like RateBeer and BeerAdvocate. Lists like the one linked above make that bias very clear, though they also help explain the origins of the bias. Many of the beers on that list are rare, hard-to-find, or produced only in limited quantities, which makes the drinking of those beers more of an event. Beers like Smuttynose IPA or Brooklyn Lager, two of my go-to beers, are readily available throughout the Northeast US and not likely to produce the same “HOLY FUCK! I’M DRINKING BEER I’VE ONLY READ ABOUT!” reaction as, say, drinking anything from Russian River in this part of the country. But that doesn’t take away from the quality of those two beers, both of which I’m happy to drink pint after pint of during a night out. On the other hand, as much as I love Alesmith’s Speedway Stout (#6 overall on RateBeer, apparently), I couldn’t have much more than two glasses of the stuff in a night.

There is a lot of discussion on beer geek forums about what drinkability means when reviewing a beer. Beer Advocate summarizes it in their article How to Review a Beer as “Would you have another?”. I also have a memory of Garrett Oliver defining a beer with high drinkability as something you could easily drink 3 or 4 pints of in a sitting, but I can’t seem to find where I read that. I suppose you could argue that sessionability is the more accurate term here. That is the big downfall of many of those Top 100 beers — even if you were lucky enough to be able to have multiple drinks of some of those beers in one sitting, it might be a challenge to actually finish them.

Yes, imperial stouts, double IPAs, and high gravity abbey ales are difficult to make and even more difficult to make well, but it is also a challenge to make a high quality session beer. Composing a solid and listenable 10 minute prog rock anthem is difficult, yet crafting an excellent three-minute pop or rock song is a challenge in its own right.

Ultimately, we either need to correctly weight for sessionability or build multiple top beer lists — those for special occasions and those for every day.

*For the record, those are Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and Bell’s Two Hearted Ale.