So is Hoppy Beer Driving Away Craft Beer Drinkers?

[alfreda89]

Maybe.

I'm a Vienna Lager style drinker by preference -- give me a Negra Modelo, or even better, the perfection of an Augustiner Brau Dunkel (dark) beer. I like smooth, odd beers like Old Peculiar or Young's Winter Warmer. But I had an Englishman turn up his nose at my 500+ year old German beer style, uninterested in it. He was seriously a hops man.

When I would look at menus, except for Negra Modelo, there would be no Vienna Lagers. You couldn't even buy my favorite beer in Texas, the last time I looked. I was going to be forced to give up gluten, and I wanted one last beer. Couldn't find one. I almost had a Newcastle Brown or a Voodoo, but I really wanted that German beer.

Or fresh Shiner Bock. None of that available, either.

Alfreda's mother brews beer. The heroine of a mystery I did is a bootlegger's great-granddaughter, finding the family hop in the back forty! I will slip the drink of the gods in whenever possible.

Because -- Beer!

Comments

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's definitely an American craft thing, and even worldwide in some cases. I still like an occasional drink of sake or cider or wine, or a good GF beer. But I don't drink alone, I don't drink when I have to drive myself home, and that covers most occasions to drink.

So I put interesting things in books instead!

Hops are used as sedatives by herbalists. I wonder if it's the super-scent thing for you, or if your body fights the soporific affects?

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I'll admit the living in a zendo bit cut down on my drinking even further... well, okay, it'd been about two years when we moved in, so maybe not so much? I sometimes like the taste of alcoholic drinks. In the right social setting, a single drink can be rather fun... but I find the effects irritating, especially if I'm going to be doing any training, which is at least daily for me. In my old lab, a lot of the lab culture was very pub centric, so I made a point of going out with them, but at that point I was training pretty much every evening, and it's not so much that I can't train with alcohol in my system as that I really don't like to. And spinning flying jump kicks... ugh. (But I don't even like teaching a beginning Chen class with alcohol in my system, though that was one of Darwin's extra special strong mint juleps.) Also, I don't sleep as well.

You may be on target with the hops. I tend to be pretty picky about smells anyway (if I had my druthers we would never burn incense in the zendo, but I concede the tradition) but hops had this heavy sweet-bitter smothering drowsiness about them. It was really too bad, because they grew much more readily than the grapes, and they looked lovely.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I've heard that alcohol will put you to sleep, but then you wake up an hour or two later. So it may affect your sleep - it does that to others.