Pearls Before Swine

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Bayside Brewers have monthly meetings. We have a few members from the Mornington Pennisula. Shoot me a PM if you are interested in coming along.

I'd love to but the recent birth of our first baby has put a serious crimp in my social activities.... :D
 
Goomba nailed it - its about balance.

I pity the fool. We refer to them as megaswill drinkers but in their mind theyre just drinking whats on offer, stuck in their regular tied pub haunt, inadvertanty lapping up the advertising. People form allegances to this rather than that (and we all do in some small fashion) and in this case its a sea of very, very similar tasting swill, and totally dishearting to us enlightened folk. Help the poor blighters i say. You're not going to win them over with your dry hopped, oak aged, imperial belgian stout, but a well balanced (of most kinds) and, unfortunatley as the case might be, well presented beer will knock socks off.

Honestly, it's got more to do with presentation than taste: hand them a green bottle of something well-carbed and super bright and you're 75% there before it's hit their tastebuds.

Hand them a soupy weizen that tastes like bubblegum and it's anyone's guess if they prove to be open-minded or not.

Yep, thats it right there totally.
 
I'd love to but the recent birth of our first baby has put a serious crimp in my social activities.... :D


I'm only 6 weeks into my second child and managed to get along to my first Bayside meet last week.
Really enjoyed it. It kicked off at 7.30pm after the wee lings were in bed, so that was do-able for me.
 
I'm only 6 weeks into my second child and managed to get along to my first Bayside meet last week.
Really enjoyed it. It kicked off at 7.30pm after the wee lings were in bed, so that was do-able for me.
Hey mate, both you and the wife need a night off from the bub every now and again.
I usually turn up a tiny bit late to my beer nerd meetings, after quickly reading some bedtime stories to the kids.

Back to the main question. It's a good question.... How generous are you with your 23L of fine craft beer. How keen are your mates to share a beer with you, etc.
One of the first hopped beers I tried out on mates was answered with "wow, this is the first beer you've made thats worth criticising." I thought that was a compliment in itself.
You'll get mates who are adventurous and others who are swill fans through and through.
Honestly I love sharing my beers and I try to not get carried away with the description of the latest one I've made.
Feedback is always interesting.
 
Your not alone there Zarni. I reckon the thing is not to try to hard. Just offer them a beer when youre having one, tell them what it is and leave it at that. If they are interested they will raise the subject in good time.
If you really need to share, get feed back and comment join a brew club. You will learn alot too. Cheers.
Daz

Totally agree.

Always offer it. Take fizzy as a little over carbonated to his preference, even if it is normal for the style... Keep in mind that to most people beer is one and the same flavour and the thought of flavours different to what is in generic lagers are an alien thing. Advertising tells them they should like nothing but ice cold lagers, filtered bright and at a low gravity. As a result, they take a while to trust anything else. The majority of my mates have come around, a few have started brewing too. But early on it was hard for them to comprehend that I brewed a different beer every time... or could drink more than one type of beer in an evening and love every one. Primal thing I guess...

If you want feedback from mates who don't know much about beer, there are a few signs. They hate the brew if they can't finish the glass. They like your beer if they ask for more. You know you've nailed it if they clean you out and left a 6 pack of what they brought in the fridge.

If you want serious constructive feedback or encouragement, join a beer club. Some people say enter comps for feedback, but in my experience this is a bit hit or miss and well short on the gain from joining a brew club.
 
VB is actually fairly bitter, around 25 IBU?

25 measured if my memory is correct.

I find most people are willing to try my beer when they find out I make it from scratch. I usually try to offer them something I know they would be into rather than push something on them they wouldn't like/are unfamiliar with (unless they love trying new experiences). If I make a bo pils, I'll give some to my brother who prefers eurolagers and won't drink dark beers.

A lot of people I know seem to be willing to try new things - gave a bloke at work a Belgian Pale/strong ale the other day. This guy will drink most things but his staples are coopers red and green and the ocassional Carlton.

He loved the beer - said it was a cracker. Many others at work have enjoyed my saisons, stouts, weizens, Irish reds, apas and IPAs without needing to know loads about the styles. The few who insist that anything that doesn't taste like VB must be crap, I don't bother offering.

No need to peddle - if people are interested, they can try it. If not, who cares?
 
I've had little success with family members of my own generation. You can tell by the loaded silence they are tolerating what they think is a failed attempt before they go back to their lagers.

The next generation are right into it. They are articulate on many of the styles, and offer constructive feedback. My duvel clone won a blind taste test against a duvel. Ok, perhaps the original wasn't handled properly, but you have to just bask in those moments. And now my wife has been converted, and particularly loves the APAs and english pales - high IBU or she thinks it's not really a beer.

When my dad was young he developed a taste for fine wines, before even aussies started on moselles in casks (bag in a box). Australian tastes matured, so just keep loving the journey for its own sake.
 
It's interesting sharing my beers with megaswill drinkers, their reactions vary heaps depending on what style I'm offering. I've had mates who normally only drink Carlton try a Munich Dunkel and love it, next time they're over the only thing I have ready to drink is an AIPA bittered to 65 IBU. Their experience is markedly different from the Dunkel!
 
I always hoped my mates would like my beer. Most do. There are always those that wont deviate, but who cares?

So, on Saturday just gone, my mate married.- I made 80L on request. All served through my taps.

20L each of what I thought would go well to the 40's crowd. LCBA clone, Golden Ale, Landlord & and AIPA.

All beers were a hit. They were drained well before the cartons in the cool room.

Many, many compliments and hours spent talking beer with those facinated.

But, what a pain in the arse. I spent months getting this ready, the amount of cleaning up, organising, transporting etc etc.

All gone in a few short hours. Was a bit of a letdown really.

Be careful what you wish for, or be tougher when people ask for 'beer favours'.

Not sure I'd do it again.
 
My biggest issue is getting people to taste the beer in the first place - alot of my mates had preconceived ideas about home brew - a few people i know tried it at uni with a kit they bought from coles and either got it infected or bottled / drunk it before it was ready. Most are now converts and want to start brewing themselves.

One of the reasons I enjoy brewing is to be able to share it with people who appreciate it, and you can gauge pretty easily who does and doesn't appreciate it.

My advice - find a staple beer that you can brew cheaply and appeals to the masses, perfect it and brew a 50L batch every now and then.

A few years ago, I was living in a share house with 2 other male uni students, with beer on tap, I could barely brew quickly enough to keep 2 beers on tap at all times (and that's with 2-3 fermenters going full time) - I started making 50 litre batches of cheap Coopers draught kit based beer (2 x Coopers draught kits, 1kg DME, 1kg dextrose + a 30 min hop addition of whatever I had lying around), just to keep the masses happy and I found they liked those batches just as much as the carefully crafted beers I was brewing

Now that I'm brewing all grain, http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/inde...&recipe=483 this is my recipe of choice for the cheap everyday drinking because everyone knows and loves CPA and based on the grain group buy prices I can now brew this for about $12 a batch - cheaper than extract brews just more time consuming.
 
I was discussing this with my brother (who's a Euroswiller, but appreciates that there are differences in beers, even if he still prefers yellow and fizzy).

I was telling him that the concept of beer as an artisan product is lost on most people.

It’s fizzy, savoury adult softdrink with a little alcohol to make one happy, and burp. Mass produced like coke.

Getting most people - beer drinkers or not to understand that it has many forms and varieties, a wide range of ingredients and requires talent to produce well, is like asking a smoker to pick up nuances between the aromas of a number of single origin malt whiskies. That sense has been long killed, either way by mass produced products.

Getting worked up about it, is pointless - people have been marketed to and conditioned to accept/do something, and for the most part, they ain't budging.

Ironically, there’s more ingredients in beer than wine, more varieties of those ingredients and it’s a more complex drink in a lot of senses (though with grapes varying wildly from season to season, maybe not always).

But wine is “sophisticated” to the masses (again branding), so no one gets that beer isn’t “beer”, is saison, alt, helles, ale, lager, pilsner....and so on.

Having said that, I got a Carlton drinker onto my APA, and he shifted his buying patterns to Fat Yak. That's a quantum shift for a Carlton drinker. He's also an avid consumer of my AIPA.

Other than him, more AIPA for me though - that I don't mind.

I'm more worried than usual about this at the moment, as I brewed a Belgian PA with T-58, which has thrown some excellent clovey phenols (high temp at start of ferment, quick drop into a lowish range). I'm thinking to myself "great beer, fits perfectly into BJCP and tastes great". But it's for a poker night, and my other thought is "is it too flavoursome for Pilsner drinkers".

I've an Irish Red on, not highly hopped, just to make sure that Euro drinkers (who happen to like standard pommie lagers and non-craft ales) aren't upset with the choice of beer.

Still keeping the AIPA for me though. :icon_drool2: :wub: :p

Goomba
 
I always hoped my mates would like my beer. Most do. There are always those that wont deviate, but who cares?

So, on Saturday just gone, my mate married.- I made 80L on request. All served through my taps.

20L each of what I thought would go well to the 40's crowd. LCBA clone, Golden Ale, Landlord & and AIPA.

All beers were a hit. They were drained well before the cartons in the cool room.

Many, many compliments and hours spent talking beer with those facinated.

But, what a pain in the arse. I spent months getting this ready, the amount of cleaning up, organising, transporting etc etc.

All gone in a few short hours. Was a bit of a letdown really.

Be careful what you wish for, or be tougher when people ask for 'beer favours'.

Not sure I'd do it again.
Pretty cool wedding present. Lot of effort!
 
I often walk across the road and have a game of pool and a few brews with a mate. Last He is a megaswill drinker and an ex K & K man. He enjoys my beers and asks intelligent questions. Last Saturday he had relatives over and offerred his brother in law one of my English Milds that I had left there. I walked over there later on for a chat and the brother in law said he loved the taste but could tell it was homebrew because it didn't taste like "real bought beer". I didn't know whether to punch or hug him.................still don't <_<
 

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