I usually assume when Europeans complain about American beers, they just are complaining about our “domestic” beers like Bud Light, Coors, PBR, etc. which makes sense, they are our bottom shelf beers.
I recently chatted with someone at a party who said “no, all American beers are bad” including microbrewery beers.
I’ve never been to Europe so I wouldn’t know, but I do like my Left Handed Milk Stout, NWPAs, and hell even the hipstered out IPAs.
Are these what y’all are referencing?
I live in Europe, but was an expert taste panelist at New Belgium Brewing in the US when I lived there.
Lefthand Milk Stout Nitro is a great beer.
There’s a lot of good beer all over the world (okay, much of it anyway). Quality has a LOT more to do with freshness, cleanliness, and lack of dissolved oxygen in the beer. You can also find bad beer most anywhere. Don’t let someone making silly blanket statement get ya down.
I will just go ahead and contradict myself by making a blanket statement that the low end of food is just better in most of the EU cuz of how much stricter the rules are. From McDonald’s to the grocery store, you kinda can’t get “terrible” food.
Woot! I drink fat tire from new Belgium as a everyday beer, although right now I am drinking modelo especial lol…
Love that you randomly called out left hand and new Belgium. Good name drops 💜
New Belgium is amazing.
1554 is one of my favorites, and I introduced my friend to the Voodoo ranger series and that’s how he left the land of domestic beers.
Thank you for your service. 🫡
Ooh I haven’t had the porter in a while actually… go Colorado!
Wow, care to tell us more about New Belgium?
How do you become an expert taster? Did you have to taste every batch to make sure it comes out tasting “correct”? How do they manage that on such a large scale?
Sure! The tasting part is complex but to grossly simplify it:
Each site has a bunch of people who are taster verified and have other jobs (rigorous program that takes a while to be part of) and they 1+ taste panel per day on each site which has a mix of new beers, old shelf beers, all the new releases, all from all of the sites, plus other market stuff (competitor products). You don’t usually know what you’re tasting outside of trainings so you just use a bunch of chemical words to describe the beer (no, you don’t say “fruity”, you talk about the specific fruit compound like acetaldehyde or ethyl hexonoate).
They only use the data of attributes you’re best at, so each taster is like an instrument that they’re also Corsa calibrating with spiked samples throughout all of that.
The best part, by far? Free snacks; good ones too. We already had limitless free beer so that doesn’t incentivize anyone
Beyond that NBB was dope. Love the people, love the beer, the company actually stands up for what it believes in. Based af, if it was in Europe I’d 100% work for them still. But we did wanna leave the US so…
Wow, how fascinating, thanks!
It makes total sense in hindsight that people have specialties. I guess I figured it to be a bit like the wine world where everybody has to have roughly the same skills in order to get by.