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?
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.