This is the kind of bad attitude I’m talking about! But we could…

My husband and I, who both consider ourselves solid beer snobs, took a trip to beer Mecca last year: Vermont. We had a very tightly packed vacation schedule, which looked something like this:
To Do & See
1) Beer

While in Burlington, we took a beer tour of the city, visiting at least four breweries that I remember. Somewhere after the third beer the other couple on our tour invited us to come with them later that night to visit the brewery that makes Beer Advocate’s top rated beer: Heady Topper, an imperial IPA from The Alchemist. They are located in Waterbury, Vermont, a bit of a drive from Burlington. When Ben and I both admitted we’d never had the beer, the woman let out a somewhat inappropriate moan as her eyes rolled back in her head.

Numero Un

While she recovered her husband let loose a long string of superlatives to describe The Alchemist’s beers that gradually took on a British air. “Oh dear,” he fussed. “My accent comes out when I’ve been drinking!” Ben asked if he was from England, to which he answered, “no, but my grandfather was born there.”

The further into the tour we went the less either of us wanted to be stuck for hours with these people in a confined space. They epitomized every stereotype of beer snobbery that I hope dearly I do not myself embody. They breathlessly turned red in the face telling me everything they knew about any beery topic at hand. They started many of their responses to me with, “Well, actually…”. They snubbed certain beers and breweries that did not somehow live up to their vertiginous standards. (Except Magic Hat? Posers.) Continue reading →