Monday, March 07, 2005
Michael Jackson on American Beer
The British beer journalist, not the pop singer.
The British beer journalist, not the pop singer.
This year, Jackson's tasting will focus on gold medal beers - award winners at the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Championships. It's a sign of Philadelphia's increasing thirst for quality beer that he had no problem finding a healthy variety of local award-winners to match against out-of-towners. Among them: Triumph Keller from New Hope, Iron Hill Russian Imperial Stout from Newark, Del., and Nodding Head Grog from Center City.
"The original proposal for the tasting was to include some gold-medal beers from Europe," Jackson said. "But I didn't feel the winners from European contests stood up to the Americans. The European competitions are so boring. The brewers are very conservative. They tend to look for beers that are, quote-unquote, well-balanced. They give awards to very neutral, boring beers...
"Frankly, it's hard to get Americans to believe that the most interesting selection of beers right now is in the United States."
As U.S. breweries improved over these 15 years, Jackson observed, so have drinkers' tastes.
"There's been a development of a real - well, I hate to use the word - beer geek," Jackson said. "They want more and more authentic, more and more extreme, more and more hoppy beers. There's ever more connoisseurship, ever more zealotry...
"And they very quickly have started to reject things that they thought were good just a few years ago."
