pouring respect down the drain

In their bid to spread the gospel of good booze, beer geeks are inadvertently brewing a class war,

Craft beer looks like a sucker move when people are just dumping it down the drain on social media

Beer geek: “That feeling when you drainpour three beers in a row and get to a winner.” Everyman: “Prob. the beersnobbiest tweet I've seen in a while.” Beer geek: “I certainly appreciate it seems that way …”

This exchange recently took place on Twitter between Tristin Hopper, a National Post reporter who’s taller and quirkier than average but can nevertheless serve as our Everyman today, and Jordan St. John, beer critic for QMI newspapers and author of two new books about beer: Ontario Beer (written with Alan McLeod) and Lost Breweries of Toronto.

The #drainpour hashtag is not exactly a phenomenon sweeping the land, but it is part of the secret language you’ll encounter if you pass through the sud-streaked looking glass and step into the world of beer obsession.

“Drainpour is a beer geek shorthand,” explains Stephen Beaumont, one of Canada's pre-eminent beer writers and co-author of The World Atlas of Beer. The term originated at BeerAdvocate and RateBeer, the leading online hubs for amateur zymurgical critique. “[Drainpour] just means a beer that’s not very good. How not very good it is depends on how geeky you want to get about it. Some geeks would regard a drainpour as something that is just not good enough for them to bother drinking,” he says, while others might reserve the term for beers with technical flaws or spoilage issues in the beer, such as the presence of diacetyl (which tastes like stale buttered popcorn) or an abundance of dimethyl sulphide (which tastes unappetizingly vegetal in a beer).

Unless you cleave firmly to restaurants that opened before 1993, you’ll have noticed that beer is to our decade as wine was to the 1980s: a relatively new but rapidly growing discovery in English-speaking North America. As with all trends, some will take it too far. Reviving the traditional “saison” style of beer is a fad equal parts hip and worthwhile when done well; adding mango to a saison probably goes a quarter-twist too far.

As The Wall Street Journal reported the other week, American beer drinkers now consume more craft beer than they do Budweiser, which initially sounds terrific for the small-scale brewing industry. However, as Slate magazine noted, when you turn the stat around, you realize that the many thousands of U.S. craft beer brands only add up to big, old Bud — which is only the third-most popular beer stateside. What we have is a market divided between people who pay extra for beer that puts on airs, and people who regard that whole enterprise with wariness.

But before the latter camp rolls its eyes over the #drainpour thing, they ought to search the term on Twitter and scroll down the list. Observe, if you will, that the most frequently dumped suds are the most gimmicky. For example, Beaumont says: “This year, for some reason, there has been a massive backlash against pumpkin beers.” And rightly so. Fruit weizen, barrel-aged ale and other miscellany fills the Twitter feed. Could it be that the beer geeks largely hate the same beers that ordinary people would find obnoxious? Yes indeed. St. John says his last beer before the tweet above was a fruit wheat beer that combined the worst aspects of fruit and wheat. The world of beer appreciation is lashing back against overthought, not-actuallytasty brews, and #drainpour is just one symptom of this.

“Breweries really are trying to run before they can walk. They open their doors and three months later they're doing a Cognac barrel-aged double IPA with brettanomyces yeast and elderflower honey. Come on, just make an IPA first,” Beaumont says. “Brewers try to jump into the fray maybe a little too fast and little too heavy and they miss what is really constructing a really good beer.”

To put it another way, the #drainpour practice reveals a unifying strand between the opposing beer camps: Many on both sides oppose flashy, eccentric beer while favouring whatever is well-made, pleasantly drinkable and unpretentious. Peace is possible, friends.

In order to realize that peace, the beer geeks must observe one rule: Stay on the right side of the boundary between snobbery and discernment. Where is the line? Try this as a working definition: Snobbery is disdain for other people’s choices. Discernment is healthy ruthlessness in your own. It’s the confidence, as St. John says, to avoid “tricking yourself into thinking that you like something that you don’t.” Snobbery is a force for evil; it intimidates people and makes them feel ashamed of their preferences. Discernment is a force for good. It nudges you, the consumer, to insist on beer you like. By the same token it empowers you to reject the beer you don't, whether that means sending back a smelly pint (please do), or pouring a regrettable purchase down the drain to leave belly room for the next candidate.

“It’s important to remember, as consumers, that you’re allowed to not like something,” St. John says. “You’re allowed to pour it down the drain. What you're not allowed to do is declare something bad because you don't like it.”

But can the ordinary beer drinker grasp all of this when spotting a #drainpour on Twitter? Will the loyal Budweiser customer want to drink all that crazy fancy beer that’s going down the drain anyway? The evidence suggests not. Craft beer looks like a sucker move when people are just dumping it down the drain on social media. It’s a misleading impression of the delights that beer exploration furnishes.

Many of the geeks employing the #drainpour hashtag have their hearts in the right place. They want to spread the gospel of good brews while rejecting the silly ones. But if the hashtag sounds like snobbery to most drinkers, it can’t be helping the cause of good beer. So you know what to do with the #drainpour, ladies and gentlemen of the discerning beer drinker’s alliance. Into the sink, and down the drain it goes.