Though, with those ratings sites, beer tasting notes probably won't be the problem in the future that they were in the past. The flavour descriptions I have of beer before 1900 would fit into a nutshell. A very small and vaguely described one.
Maybe the world of anti-social media, with it's over-documenting of everyone's toenail-clippings, has fixed this problem. The unrecording of the banal. The everyday crap that, because everyone knows it, is pointless recording.
(Thinking about it, a me of fifty years hence will probably be scouring the Twitter archives looking for references to "sludge", trying to work out exactly when the beer world went totally insane. And when it came to its senses.)
But you aren't going to get all the really tiny, tedious detail of the beer world in tweets. Just think of what you wouldn't bother remarking on. Because it's just so everyday and, well, fucking obvious. That's what you should be recording. Things too dull to even think of mentioning.**
That's the stuff future historians will love you for.
* Wish I'd saved more DDR labels. This is one of the few I collected myself.
** You may not get you any retweets. And lose followers. Just think of the public service you're doing.
ReplyDeleteI already have this mindset and I don’t really blog any more in the hope or expectation that anyone is going to be interested in the present day in what I have to say. I do it for people like you and me a hundred years in the future.
My local CAMRA magazine serves the same purpose, recording pubs that open and close and breweries launching new beers. Because I know that if we don’t do it, nobody else will.
I guess for most people for the most of history, beer just tasted of beer and that was it, what else was there to say?
ReplyDeleteIt was only when wine drinking became more widespread and not just for the upper classes that people became exposed to the idea of thinking in any depth about what their drink actually tasted like. At the same time single malt whisky changed from being an esoteric speciality to a drink that was more than just a drink. Much of what was written and said was just wank but the trend was there and it quickly spread to beer.
For me, I was into beer, I wanted to try as many different beers as possible, and I could taste the difference between beers. But I never developed a vocabulary for it, so I can remember exactly what some (far from all!) beers tasted like back into the seventies, but I couldn't put it into words. Tetley's tasted like Tetley's, Websters tasted like Websters, Brew 10 tasted like bugger all. But thats no use to anyone who wants to know what these beers actually tasted like. I wish I could do better!
I’m guilty of recording the smell, taste, mouthfeel, finish and aftertaste of beer.
DeleteOscar
I'm not sure you mean by "thinking in any depth," but why do you think breweries went through the trouble of brewing so many beer styles if people didn't bother differentiating what they drank? It seems to me that everyday or working class people, or rich people who drank beer, had opinions about what they liked, too.
DeleteMy contribution to beer drinking history....
ReplyDeletePilsner Urquell from the bottle tastes better now that it did in the 1980s as it now comes in brown bottles sealed inside a closed cardboard box, instead of green bottles in an open carboard container.
But it doesn't tast as good as the tap beer in Prague, which doesn't taste as good as the tap beer in Pilsen, which doesn't taste as good as the sample they give directly from the wood cask in the cellar of the Pilsner Urquell brewery. Which is heavenly.