Just kidding. I'm going to talk about beer.
I love beer. If you don't, that's fine, but I challenge you to find a beverage as versatile and unique. Want a cheap beer you can get wasted on with your bros? American industrial lager has you covered. Want a beer you can enjoy in front of the fire on a winter's night? Try a heavy stout or porter. Want a light beer you can drink all afternoon and not feel disgusted with yourself at the end of the day? Probably going to want to go with a saison. Beer can have high or low alcohol content, be light or dark, chock full of various flavors or devoted to only one or two distinct flavors. Beer can be anything you want it to be.
For all its diversity, however, beer is a simple drink. Unlike say, wine, aged for years and saved for a special occasion, even the best beer (in most cases) is made in the span of a month and goes bad in about a year. Beer isn't a conversation piece, or something you open on a very special occasion. There aren't beers from 1906, and if there were, you wouldn't want to consume them. Beer is something you drink. Beer isn't about show; beer is about taste. You brew it, you bottle it, you drink it, you brew more beer. It encourages you to enjoy it. You don't feel guilty about opening a really nice beer.
This simplicity is what makes it easy to experiment with beer. Want to do something crazy with your next brew? Want to make a grapefruit and hot chili porter? Go for it. If it goes wrong, make a new batch. Beer is the perfect beverage for free spirits. And there's a certain advantage to a beverage that only takes about fifty dollars and a month or two to make: if you did mess up, or even if you just aren't satisfied with your results, you can repeat the process, tweak your recipe, and get it right where you want it at very little cost and with very little comparative effort. Beer is the perfect beverage for control freaks
However, as simple as beer is, it easily matches wine or whiskey for sheer complexity of flavor. Even the worst beers have a certain unique taste or tastes to them. Let me give you an example. The beer I'm having right now is a George Killian's Irish Red. It is not a good beer, but it's not terrible either. It kind of fills that middle role for people who want a decent beer with a somewhat different taste, but don't want to pay a lot for it. I happen to have some around from helping a friend move into his new apartment.
What you may not know is that Killian's is a Coor's product. It wears the label of "Irish Red," but, like Goose Island, it's owned by a major producer of cheap American industrial lager and designed to compete with the craft beer market at a lower price point. However, I wouldn't necessarily need to look at the box or the price tag to figure that out. Irish Red Ale, according to the BJCP, should have "moderate caramel malt flavor and sweetness, occasionally with a buttered toast or toffee-like quality..." Killian's does not entirely lack these tastes, of course, but lurking under the maltiness is the telltale hint of that metallic tang so often present in American industrial such as Budweiser or, appropriately enough, Coors.
This doesn't make Killian's a bad beer, but it does make it different than a traditional craft Red. For all I know, this is intentional, designed to appeal to those coming from Coor's more mainstream offerings. I honestly don't know. What I do know is that that taste alone makes Killian's not quite a pure Irish Red, and not quite your standard industrial. It's a midrange beer, a beer designed to fill a gap. It has a purpose, and it fills it well. That one flavor, not even a particularly desirable one to many, tells an entire story about this beer, its origins, the recent history of the commercial beer market, and the niche it's trying to fill. That's the dynamism of beer.
One may not think that a taste like that in a beer is a good basis for comparison to wine in terms of complexity. However, I'd argue that it is, because if you can get that much information out of a bottle of red-colored, malty Coor's Light, think of what you can get from a high-end craft beer or a homebrew. One distinct flavor, multiple flavors, subtle tones, anything you'd get from wine, you can absolutely get in beer, and you do. Go to any homebrewer's meeting and you'll get not only some of the best beers you've ever had, but a unique story to go with each beer.
If that's not enough of a demonstration, consider that Budweiser and one of my favorite commercially available beers, Old Engine Oil, are both beer. I'm sure you're familiar with the appearance, and maybe the taste, of Budweiser. Old Engine Oil looks like this:
As you might imagine, the taste of these two beers is wildly different. Yet, they are both beer.
This brings me to another facet of beer. Beer is a peasant's beverage. It is the people's beverage. Hell, it's everyone's beverage. When you see a construction worker on the street, you generally don't assume he's going home and cracking open a bottle of wine. However, he's not cracking a bottle of the stuff pictured above either. This is yet another example of beer's range. Everyone can drink beer, from the richest to the poorest.
That being said, even generally high end beers aren't especially expensive. Sure, there's the occasional double digit bottle, but for the most part, you don't pay more than six bucks for a beer outside of a bar. Beer may be complex, but it's not expensive.
Perhaps that's what I'm struggling to really say about beer and why I love it. It's hard to describe exactly why beer is so great precisely because beer is... beer. It's complex, but it doesn't invite you to make a big deal out of it. It appeals to the hipster who wants to impress his friends by drinking some unnecessarily hopped up IPA as easily as it appeals to the factory worker who goes home and has a can of Miller Lite at the end of a day. Beer is all things to all people. It's accessible in a way that wine or whiskey can never be.
To be fair, I know nothing about wine or whiskey, and I'm sure I've made some egregious errors in defining their characters. That being said, at the end of the day, I can't think of a drink as diverse as beer, or a drink with more range. I can't think of a beverage as simple, cheap, and accessible, yet as simultaneously complex as beer. I can't think of a drink you can pound back all night with your best friends or simply have one of at home for a nice relaxing evening. That's why, beer snob though I am, I will drink any beer put in front of me. Yes, some beers are better than others. Yes, a good beer is preferable to a soullessly created, industrial beer. But at the end of the day, beer is beer. It's a drink that has mountains of class while remaining essentially modest, and that commands my respect.
I'm going to go grab another Killian's.
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