{"id":17208,"date":"2015-08-21T16:35:31","date_gmt":"2015-08-21T04:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/?p=17208"},"modified":"2015-08-29T02:35:42","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T14:35:42","slug":"beer-writing-caution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2015\/08\/21\/beer-writing-caution\/","title":{"rendered":"Beer writing: a word of caution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most beer writing is crap.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This should be unsurprising and uncontroversial for the simple reason that\u00a0most of everything is crap<\/em>. Enshrined as\u00a0Sturgeon’s law<\/a>, this isn’t a cynical or depressing conclusion; just a sound observation and call for better mental hygiene. But that strangely-comforting general cause shouldn’t blind us to the idiosyncratic causes of crapness in beer commentary \u2014 insidious things which we should strive to keep in mind. Reading with your faculties more-sharply engaged is just as life-enhancing\u00a0as\u00a0drinking\u00a0more thoughtfully is. I recommend both.<\/p>\n

\"'The<\/a>
Neither the best, nor the last \u2014 mercifully<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was forcefully reminded of all this when I picked up<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0The Ultimate Book of Beers<\/em>, a glossy British publication<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> from just last year which attempts to round-up the world and history of beer by way of two hundred pages and four hundred examples. The result\u00a0is, quite frankly, terrible. But it is at least\u00a0instructively terrible, and that makes it great \u2014 even though it’s not the greatness they were seeking.<\/p>\n

Too much beer writing sinks to the level of crap insidiously, because it either\u00a0is or just appears like it\u00a0might be advertising in drag; most amateur and professional commentators still won’t spell out commercial entanglements with their subjects (which might account for surprisingly-strong praise or mysteriously-missing criticism, or both), or even just note that the proximate cause for them talking about some particular thing at all<\/em> is that free samples from the brewery arrived in the post.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> But sometimes, you don’t even need to start pondering potential\u00a0moral wrongness; occasionally something will just overdose on old-fashioned\u00a0factual wrongness. Here, there were some telltale false steps early on \u2014 like retelling a debunked version of the history of IPA that’d make Martyn Cornell spin in his grave<\/a>, if he wasn’t still alive \u2014 but the wheels most-obviously fell off, for me, when I flipped ahead to the New Zealand section, curious to see their summation of the place where I live, and (after all) usually drink<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>
New Zealand beer, through a lens of significant weirdness<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The three-spread section features sixteen beers<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and manages to make errors both trifling and troubling which vary\u00a0from obvious marketing-guff passed on as gospel to patently bizarre weirdness pulled from nowhere obvious. They get their hop varieties confused, slightly mangle a few brewery and beer names, entirely elide the reality and centrality of contract brewing in\u00a0our modern scene (Epic, Bach, and Yeastie Boys are all listed as if they were bricks-and-mortar operations),<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> completely ignore the many-branded natures of our bigger companies,<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and a give over a half-page section to a beer (namely Pink Elephant’s ‘Imperious Rushin Stowt’) that hadn’t been brewed for several years when\u00a0the book was published.<\/p>\n

The selection, as a group<\/em>, is also pants-on-head nonsensical. This isn’t even destined to be useful to future generations\u00a0as a (flawed) historical document because the sampling is so un-self-consciously bizarre: it doesn’t track with present or historical popularity, or award-winningness, or uniqueness, or any kind of\u00a0story about what we’re doing here. It’s not even a case of “we went there and this is what we had”, which would at least be obviously personal and idiosyncratic. My best guess is that the breweries listed were the quickest to respond to requests for photos and blurbs\u00a0\u2014\u00a0not a\u00a0great<\/em> way to go about an “ultimate” survey.<\/p>\n

\"'Did<\/a>
Disinfobox<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then\u00a0there’s the utterly baffling claim in a break-out text box that “ice brewed beers are popular in New Zealand”. This is an unbelievably niche practice of freezing some of the water out of beer to make what remains stronger, and you’d struggle to find more than one<\/em> example around here, if that.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0When the answer to one\u00a0Did you know?<\/em>\u00a0aside is “no, I fucking did not<\/em>, because I understand what ‘knowledge’ is and your statement was complete bollocks”, all the others are cast into question. There’s basically one of these putative factoids per page, and while I’m a determined collector of trivia I’m\u00a0nowhere near expert enough to rule on most of the others. The presence of\u00a0that<\/em>, though, is an unpromising sign. Which is a perfect microcosm for the rest of the damn book \u2014 given the smattering of errors and distortions I can spot in the accounts of beers I\u00a0know, how can I put any stock in the listings for things I’d never heard of? Easy: I can’t.\u00a0If they so weirdly and subtly and pointlessly flub the story of beer in New Zealand \u2014 a country so historically and culturally linked to theirs that their\u00a0flag is (for now<\/a>) on\u00a0ours\u00a0\u2014 there’s scant\u00a0hope for the rest of the planet.<\/p>\n

All of this is emblematic of wider problems: this area\u00a0\u2014 like all\u00a0fields of criticism and reportage \u2014 is beset by challenges of overturning myth, unpacking spin, overcoming\u00a0biases, and navigating conflicts of interest. I don’t know nearly enough about the creation of\u00a0this book to accuse it of falling foul on the\u00a0ethics \u2014 that’s a minefield for another time and another example\u00a0\u2014\u00a0but the point is that you need to be wary of crapness in all its forms and whatever its cause. And when you hear the\u00a0clang of a factual error or\u00a0catch the whiff of an un-declared conflict of interest,\u00a0hold on to that skepticism<\/em>. We should do more to make it unnecessary\u00a0\u2014 and it wouldn’t take much; a little more humility, a little more honesty \u2014 but unfortunately, it’ll still serve you well.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most beer writing is crap. This should be unsurprising and uncontroversial for the simple reason that\u00a0most of everything is crap. Enshrined as\u00a0Sturgeon’s law, this isn’t a cynical or depressing conclusion; just a sound observation and call for better mental hygiene. But that strangely-comforting general cause shouldn’t blind us to the idiosyncratic causes of crapness in … Continue reading Beer writing: a word of caution<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting-finds"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":18326,"url":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2016\/08\/08\/hope-and-dread\/","url_meta":{"origin":17208,"position":0},"title":"Equal parts hope and dread","author":"Phil","date":"August 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The days are just packed. This is always a weird time of year to be a beer geek who works in the beer business; the combination of so much going on and so much to do warrants one of those legendary compound German words. I\u00a0am\u00a0exhaustixhilarated. This\u00a0is\u00a0terrificifying. 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A few recent discussions of whether (and how) we should more-openly mix our politics and our pitching or\u00a0purchasing have reminded me to belatedly post it here. 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