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Showing posts from July, 2013

On cans and boxes

Yesterday, while I was on the bus to Prague, I suddenly started thinking about cans. I don't know why, I hardly ever drink canned beer here (though I did while I was in Spain ) mainly because none of my favourite beers come in that format (some don't even come in glass bottle!), but thought about can I did, and then I started thinking about another sort of container. It's funny how things change with time. When I started to get interested in this beer thing there weren't many voices that spoke well of cans; to most beer people they were seen as an unworthy container for good beer, or at least that's the impression I had at the time. But one day, some American craft breweries started to sell some of their beers in cans and our view on them changed because, well, it turned out it was wrong all along. Whatever the disadvantages of the container are, they are outweighed by the advantages, at least with some beers (though, considering this experience in Colombia wit

Spanish Obervations

The reason for my recent trip to Spain was far, very far from being a vacation. In spite of that, and because I had to walk a lot here and there, I drunk plenty of beer (the heat almost forced me to do so). I didn't make any pictures, let alone take notes, but I still wanted to share with you some of my observations. In my previous visit two years ago, at Easter, I was pleasantly surprised by the good condition of the mass produced beers at bars (temperatures notwithstanding). Unfortunately, I can't say the same this time; by and large, the beer that I had on tap was shit. Not the sort of “this is shit” , like I said the first time I drank a Weizenbier, that's subjective shit. I'm speaking about objective shit (really, it go to a point when I decided that, if all I needed was to quench my thirst, I would buy a chilled bottle or can at a shop). As I've mentioned several times, I understand the process of beer making as a chain of many links that it could be sai

Some Monday Musings

Consumer Reports , something like the American Version of dTest, published their choice of the Best Craft Beers , where you can read this gem: The best lagers are very tasty but not quite complex or intense enough to be excellent. This ranks among the most stupid thinks I've read about beer. The people who wrote this seem to understand beer almost as well as I understand the rules of Armenian grammar. Now, I've got no problem if someone prefers complex or intense beers. That's fine, but this evaluation is presented as something beyond the "like it/don't like it" and it fails because the people behind it point as a sort of shortcoming something the beers in question are not meant to be. It's as if I criticised Lambics for being sour or a super hero film for not being realistic, it'd be more than ignorant, it'd be idiotic. This has somehow reminded me of a couple of recent articles about wine, or rather, about wine tasting being a whole lot of