The Summer 2023 issue of Food & Dining Magazine — our 20th Anniversary issue — is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online.
On those rare occasions when I’m compelled to visit the LinkedIn site (which invariably leave me yearning for a drink, or maybe eighteen) I always notice the acronym “MBA” littering the digital landscape not unlike all those discarded plastic cups in the grandstands after a ballgame.
MBwhat?
It stands for Master of Beer Advocacy, right? I mean, what else could the letters possibly signify?
This brings me to Jeff Alworth; if anyone is a masterful beer advocate, it’s him. In my view, Alworth is a great beer writer because he always makes the reader think, and no single piece of beer writing of late has compelled me to ponder quite as deeply as Alworth’s essay, “Did the pursuit of beer ‘styles’ lead us down a blind alley?”
Your attention to Alworth’s position in the matter of beer style is humbly requested. Go read it. Ponder it. The essay can’t be easily summarized in a pull or two, and there’s no pay wall. This said, these three excerpts somewhat summarize Alworth’s argument.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking about beer style per se, but it has become so codified and calcified that it’s as much a straightjacket as it is a tool for understanding. We won’t and shouldn’t abandon beer styles entirely, but I think we need to develop a new relationship to them.
How so?
(By backing) away from the idea of style as the sole or even most important way to understand beer. So many things are more important, like the history of a type of beer, the way it’s made, and the tradition it comes from. When we take styles in isolation, we shear these elements from a type of beer.
But there’ll be pushback.
The resistance to change comes, I believe, from a fear of what we’ll lose rather than what we’ll gain if we move away from styles. The fault here is the assumption that customers understand style in the first place. The only reason to slap “gose” on a smoothie sour is because a brewery thinks it will convey useful information to the customer. But aside from a very few descriptive terms—IPA, lager, pilsner, pale ale, stout—styles are meaningless to them. Conversely,...Read more
