A Philosophical Question

So both of us are readers of Serious Eats, and a link came through today that I found interesting. Not interesting as in "wow, that's cool," or interesting as in "fascinating." More interesting as in "wow, this guy's full of crap."

Specifically, the blogger, Jeff, asks whether beer can be perfect. A few choice edits to tease out of the post:

• "Bill [a fellow beer judge] declared, boldly, that there's no such thing as a 50-point beer. A 49--theoretically possible. But no such beer exists that could not be improved upon."

• "If you don't believe in a perfect beer, then each sniff and sip is forensic; you're looking for the imperfection. Imperfections may be objective or purely a matter of taste. . . . I taste it meditatively. I try to see what the brewer was doing. . . . A beer must be perfect on its own terms--the realization of the brewer's highest goals."

If we may assume the best of brewers that they wouldn't send out or ship crappy product, then Jeff's relativism, in my opinion, means that every beer is perfect, since the brewer's highest goals would be to produce a beer about which he or she can be proud. And that's ridiculous. And even if we don't assume the best of brewers (imagining that they're weighing the cost of perfection against expected profit) we'd conclude that the guy who brews Firestone Walker Double Barrel Ale (or any other beer either of us isn't wild about) sent out beer he's not proud of because it's not in his economic interests to do so. Even then, if that's what the brewer's goal is, then perfect! - hooray. Somehow, I don't think Steve agrees that the DBA is perfect. But the guy who made it thinks it is. So cheers to that guy? Really?

Jeff also gets into some religious motif I'm not even going to wade into. And a commenter named "dr wort" decided to provide (copy & paste) a dictionary definition of the word "judge," as if the definition will help us wade through the argument somehow. Real helpful.

In his first post, my co-blogger put up some numerical scores for beer. I see nothing wrong with this, but I found his comments are much more compelling and informative, and ultimately, more useful than his numbers. For me, it's not about a score - it's about whether I liked the beer at the time, what I thought about it, and whether I can describe it in words. We're allowed this kind of wishy-washy descriptor: we're blogging about beer because we love it, not judging it for competition, I'll grant, but I'd much rather write a paragraph about a beer than attempt to assign a score or a grade, especially when nobody can agree on what a perfect 10 even means.