A while ago I was drinking homebrew with a friend and he said, "You know the difference between an amateur and a professional photographer? An amateur shows you all his pictures and a professional only shows you the ones which are good."
"What the hell do you mean by that?" I said.
What he meant was: I was presenting a selection of beers, some of which were good, and some which sucked. He would have rather only drank the good beer. I thought making him get rid of some of my shitty beer was the price of free drinking. So, there was a bit of an impasse.
Anybody who has spent much time around homebrewers has been faced with a crappy beer and a moon-faced brewer who claims they want your honest opinion. Probably, 90 percent of the time they don't and will get all offended if you say, "Are you trying to poison me?" or "This beer has more infections than the floor of a peepshow booth."
What you need to evaluate is whether or not the brewer really wants feedback or if they just want smoke blown up their ass.
The best way, I have found, it to let someone evaluate their own beer. Ask, "What were you trying to accomplish with this beer?" Most of the time someone has a pretty good idea what they wanted their beer to be: "A clone of Heineken," or "An oatmeal stout." Once they reveal what the beer should be they should come to a conclusion on how close they were to the mark.
Brewers, let's be honest with ourselves, not everything we produce is liquid gold. One of the hardest steps in identifying how you need to improve is learning to be critical of your own product. It's difficult because you are pouring your heart into crafting something beautiful and it just turns out shitty. It's like having an ugly kid.
The first step is just asking the questions, "Does this beer taste good? If I ordered it at a bar and paid $5 for a pint, would I be pissed off?" Sometimes the beer may not be totally what you were anticipating, but still pretty drinkable. That is the real determination of quality, when you finish your beer you should want to have another one, not switch to a different kind or lick a cat butt to get the taste out of your mouth.
Most of the time, the beer you are brewing has been brewed before. This gives you a place to start. If you are trying for an American brown ale, then pickup a brown or two and see how yours compares. They probably won't taste the same but they should be similar enough to say they are in the same class.
Don't sell yourself short. Anybody can produce prison hooch, but anybody can also make commercial quality beer with a big pot and a bucket, you just have to stay sanitized, don't be cheap and control temps. Don't make excuses like: "It's only homebrew," "Toe cheese is my house flavor," or "It'll get me drunk." Hold yourself to a standard.
I have made enough crappy beer to fill a hot tub. To be honest, some of my bad beers were probably better suited as an ass-wash than for drinking. However, I struggle with just dumping beer, so what do you do with the junk?
Age it. Some problems will clear themselves up. Hop bitterness, oak tannins and sharp roastyness will all mellow with age. Occasionally, six months or a year will make a bad beer into a pretty good beer. But like herpes, time will not clear up an infection of bacteria.
Man up and drink it. Stop being a baby and just choke it down. This is a way to pay for those mistakes. You can drink a couple of good beers and then switch to the bad stuff, put it in a beer bong, or mix it with Sprite. Whatever it takes to put it down.
Give it to goobers. When people find out you are a homebrewer the first thing they always says is, "I want some!" If someone is genuinely interested, and I like them, I will put together a mixed six of quality beers for their enjoyment. However, there is nothing more frustrating than when someone says about an award winning porter, "I didn't like it. It didn't taste anything like Bud Light." Give people like this your junk beer. A Bud Light drinker won't know the difference between a perfectly brewed stout and pond water.
Get feedback. If a beer didn't turn out and you are just not sure why, take it to a homebrew club meeting and ask people to taste it, but warn them it is off. Odds are, you are not the first person to screw something up and you might get advise to help out.
Other uses. Slugs are attracted to beer. So are wasps. You can use it to fertilize the garden or rejuvenate brown spots in the grass.
The bottom line is take pride in your beer and try to only show the world your best efforts. In order to do so, you will need to be critical of your failures but don't get discouraged when a couple of batches go wrong. Just identify how they went wrong and learn from the mistakes.
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