Great beer, Jim, but you gotta rethink that tagline…
I will be the first in crowd of beer geeks to run to the defense of Boston Beer Company and its Samuel Adams line of beers. Sam Adams founder Jim Koch is one of the pioneers of American craft beer and his beer is usually pretty good. Jim comes from a long line of brewers and was groomed to break from family tradition. Jim graduated from Harvard and was a business consultant when he went astray and picked up the family mash fork and launched Samuel Adams.
Jim Koch seems like a pretty smart guy, Harvard and all, but then he said it… “Hops are to beer what grapes are to wine.” Huh? I am usually pretty good at those IQ test questions like “Glove is to hand as shoe is to_____”, but I can’t see how Jim’s quote (and now trademark) makes any beery sense at all. Lets examine…
As we all know, grapes provide all of the fermentable sugars and essential flavors in quality wine. The juice is fermented to leave wonderful, flavorful wine. If the grapes are good, the wine is good. Not much else goes into it. Hops on the other hand flavor and bitter the beer. They are an herb. They are not an essential beer ingredient and they are non-fermentable. In fact, hops have only been used for brewing for 300 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, I like hops and hoppy beer. Hops provide a nice bitterness to offset malt sweetness. They also provide wonderful spicy, sometimes citrusy aromas and flavors — but they are in no way analogous to the grape in wine making. I cannot think of an analog for hops in wine, except maybe for elderflowers used in some German wines. (John Brown? Please chime in here…)
A better tagline would be “Malt is to beer as grapes are to wine” — now that’s better…
