I've been brewing beer a good long while. Making good beer isn't real hard. Almost all the beers I make are good. Great beer is another story.
Feedback is one thing, whether from polite friends who just say the beer is great, or from those with more detailed responses. But then there's my own judgment. Even though my take on my beer is unavoidably subjective and biased, it's the only one that truly matters in the end.
Many of us look for continual improvement: better recipes, equipment, processes... we hope that we'll be really happy, not just mostly happy, with more of our beers. But we're our own most demanding taste testers, and there's a sort of sliding scale: as my beers improved, my expectations rose. Standout successes continue to be bracketed by merely good batches, even if "good" is better than it used to be because the bar got raised. (No, not that bar!)
(Some may feel differently. I get how a rack of competition ribbons might convince a brewer to chill on the continual improvement thing. Satisfaction is good. Complacency, not so much.)
A small story illustrates what I'm feeling. Years ago, a friend who had gone to cooking school cooked dinner for a group, and expressed frustration that the really great meal he made for us had not turned out as well as he hoped or expected. I told him a true artist is never fully satisfied with their creations.
I guess, for me, the bar is always out of reach, even as I celebrate the success of almost every batch and the occasional stand-out that even I feel is a great beer.
What about you?
Feedback is one thing, whether from polite friends who just say the beer is great, or from those with more detailed responses. But then there's my own judgment. Even though my take on my beer is unavoidably subjective and biased, it's the only one that truly matters in the end.
Many of us look for continual improvement: better recipes, equipment, processes... we hope that we'll be really happy, not just mostly happy, with more of our beers. But we're our own most demanding taste testers, and there's a sort of sliding scale: as my beers improved, my expectations rose. Standout successes continue to be bracketed by merely good batches, even if "good" is better than it used to be because the bar got raised. (No, not that bar!)
(Some may feel differently. I get how a rack of competition ribbons might convince a brewer to chill on the continual improvement thing. Satisfaction is good. Complacency, not so much.)
A small story illustrates what I'm feeling. Years ago, a friend who had gone to cooking school cooked dinner for a group, and expressed frustration that the really great meal he made for us had not turned out as well as he hoped or expected. I told him a true artist is never fully satisfied with their creations.
I guess, for me, the bar is always out of reach, even as I celebrate the success of almost every batch and the occasional stand-out that even I feel is a great beer.
What about you?
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