For our first session of Beer Blogging Friday I chose an old local favorite, San Quentin’s Breakout Stout from Marin Brewing. I must confess that it’s been at least several years since I’d tasted it and, as such, was looking very forward to finding out how much it had changed or I had changed in the intervening time. Since there are no real rules, I’ve decided to approach the Session as I would any session of drinking beer, with good conversation and camaraderie. So while the talk may be imaginary, the beer is not.

I’d had a few ales growing up, Genesee Cream Ale, especially in that minimalist green can, was a teen favorite among my peers, and Yuengling had their Lord Chesterfield Ale. Then there was Ballantine which relatives in New Jersey seemed to prefer. But Bass and Guinness were worlds different from those and seemed positively exotic by comparison. That seems odd now, with the two imports more pedestrian among the exponentially wider field of available beers today, but it really was a different time. But enough about my father.

San Quentin’s Breakout Stout is made by friend Arne Johnson, head brewer at Marin Brewing, who’s been brewing there for a dozen years. I mention this because I’ve been thinking lately about some thoughts Alan McLeod had on “Do We Love The Beer Or Brewer?” He mentioned it in conjunction with a discussion Lew Bryson heated up over what, as writers, we owe the beer industry. And I know this may sound a bit wishy-washy, but I can see merits in both sides of this debate. Certainly we must be honest and forthright in our opinions and free to dislike a beer if we truly believe it to be inferior in some way. But — and Lew pointed this out, too — that doesn’t mean people who hate gueuze should write critically about it or that bad samples should create a bad review, especially if the sample went bad while cellared by the critic. If a brewery sends a bad sample, that’s another matter.

But back to Alan’s query, who do we love? I assume I’m not too atypical among my colleagues in having many close friends who are brewers. In such an insular and incestuous industry it’s all but inevitable that you see the same people at events, tastings, festivals, etc. over and over again. To my mind, it would be stranger still to not have brewer friends under such conditions. There are a lot of great people in this industry. Frankly, it’s one of the reasons I love my job. Among other industries I have known or worked in, brewing has perhaps the lowest ratio of assholes (let’s call in the A-Ratio) I’ve yet encountered. There are a few to be sure — you know who you are — but by and large the brewing community is one I want to be a part of and support precisely because of the people in it. I used to work in the music business once upon a time and by contrast the A-Ratio was quite high. And once you met a “rock star” who was so full of himself and a mess of a human being, it was truly hard to listen to his music in quite the same way afterward. You could still appreciate his talents and artistry, but only up to a point. Because once you knew what a wanker he was and how he treated the people around him, etc. you no longer wanted his music to be in the background of your life anymore. At least that was my reaction.

So what does that mean for brewers versus their brew? Knowing who made a beer I think does indeed influence at least our approach to a beer, even as we try to be as objective as possible. It would be naïve to believe otherwise. Think about it this way. Someone hands you a beer and says try this, it’s a new one from Russian River Brewing. Now if you like other beers you’ve had from them, you’ll likely be more inclined or predisposed to evaluate it, if not more favorably, at least with greater care and latitude than if the beer was presented as being from a brewer whose efforts you generally didn’t care for. That’s just human nature. In effect it’s Aristotle’s syllogisms occurring naturally in the real world.

It’s also the reason that we always evaluate beer in competition blindly, often double blind (meaning we don’t even know whose beers are entered). I do agree with Alan when he writes that we “have to remember that the subject matter itself is the important thing.” But unless you’re tasting it blind, I also think it’s practically impossible to separate it from outside influence, and to me that means other factors are also important to varying degrees. In quantum physics in the first half of the last century, physicists had a problem with light. Sometimes it behaved like a particle and sometimes like a wave. Eventually they figured out that light behaved as one or the other based on the kind of experiment you used to examine it. And this led to the idea that it was impossible to adopt the role of independent observer in any experiment because scientists couldn’t separate themselves from the world they were observing. They couldn’t step out of a door and be outside the universe, and that also meant that there would always be some part of any experiment that was influenced by the observer. This is known as the “observer effect,” which is defined as follows. “The observer effect refers to changes that the act of observing has on the phenomenon being observed.”

And as arcane a reference as that is, I think it also applies to tasting and evaluating beer. We could call it the “taster effect,” and define it as the influences on the act of tasting a beer changes the experience and has an effect on the beer being tasted. Does it mean objectivity is impossible? Maybe, but hopefully as professionals we can get to a very high degree of objectiveness and play down the outside influences, large and small, as best we can. I think that’s the best we can hope for, that with experience and diligent study we reach a point where our evaluations are internally consistent, that is we tend to view the same defects and positive qualities the same way regardless of the beer. You may at this point be thinking I’ve veered off track here, so let’s get back to the brewer. Do we love the brewer or the beer? I think it’s a little of both. The beer may be the primary reason we’re all here but as the creator of the stuff we all love, he or she can’t be ignored entirely either. Different brewers make their beer in different ways, of course, meaning their influence directly effects the final product. Knowing who made a beer also reveals something subtle about it. It tells us about intention, about what they were trying to make. It tells us what ingredients are more likely to have been used. It may tell us something about the water used, or any number of factors that effect the taste of the beer. If you enjoy the beers of a particular brewer then you know at least there’s a high degree of probability that you’ll also enjoy a new effort by that brewer. It’s no guarantee, obviously, but it offers you a reasonable assumption and ultimately I think changes how you approach tasting that beer. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, just something I think we should acknowledge and be aware of. Because we don’t live a vacuum, separated from the rest of the world with just our beer. The whole world conspired together to put that glass of beer in our hands at that particular moment in time. Every single preceding moment influenced what we will do next, whether it gets a good or a bad review. And for that, I love the brewer, too, because he made the beer in my hand. Of course, after I taste it, I may decide I hate him just as passionately, fickle critic that I may be.