Beer and Wine: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

I mean no disrespect to the Lager Heads, who had great coverage today of a beer vs. wine competition — I’ve levied plenty of jokes at wine myself. But NYT’s Eric Asimov wrote a wonderful call to sanity today on his blog The Pour, “A Plea for Peaceful Coexistence” (likely in response to the same event the Lager Heads covered). The crux:

The irony is that great beer and great wine are on the same team. The enemy of beer is not wine and the enemy of wine is not beer, just as the enemy of bread is not fruit and vice versa. But the enemy of good beer and good wine, and good food in general, is bad beer, bad wine and, yes, bad food.

This is exactly the kind of clear, sober (ahem) thinking that informs my philosophy about what beers to review, and how. The enemy of good beer is bad beer, and by far the largest propagators of bad beer are macrobreweries like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors. Hell, they’re the largest propagators of any type of beer — macros make up 96% of the market.

Cheers to Asimov for addressing this topic in a large, mainstream publication. But a wag of a finger for tasting 10 stouts and not including a single entrant from Bell’s or Founders, which are both available in New York and, among widely distributed microbreweries, two of the country’s most dominant stout brewers. Eric, can you help me out here?

Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Tags: New York Times