You gotta try this beer that tastes like beer, it's awesome!

I'm a drink fanatic.

Yes, beer is usually my number one choice. However, every circumstance can't call for a beer. So, in some occasions, I turn on my eye-glass windshield wipers and try to clear off the beer goggles. I'm out scouring the shelves to find libations other than the malty liquid that keeps wanting to pound down in-front of me. Coffee. Tea. Wine. Boba. Juice. Smoothies. I love them all. When I branch out to another oasis of liquid, I look for something that differentiates itself by being unique and distinct from other options.

Recent curiosity found me researching coffee on the web. Cyberspace swims with radicals for this black liquid. In my reading it appears that most coffee enthusiasts keep calibrating their beverages with wine. They know their subject, coffee, very well. They approach their subject from a well informed perspective; covering climate, soil, and cultivation, the nuances of roasting your beans, and the most important part-sensory textures: taste, smell, and touch (in the mouth, of course). Disappointingly though, they keep coming back to this calibration with wine.

I see this same thing in the beer spectrum. Heck, I do it myself. I feel the need to justify beers status in the connoisseur's world, often bringing up the comparison that beer has a broader range of styles than wine and that beer is a better fit with most foods.

Recently, though, I've come to the conclusion that this approach is a mistake.

All of these beverages can stand on their own two legs (or glass stem or ceramic cup bottom for that matter). Even great beer writers such as Garret Oliver fall into this trap. In his book The Brewmaster's Table he writes "Wine is a simple beverage to produce. In order to make wine, one needs only grapes. Crush the grapes, and the natural yeast on the grape skins will start the fermentation; and pretty soon--voila!--you'll have wine. In fact, if you have enough grapes, they'll crush themselves by their own weight--the winemaker doesn't even need to do that! Beer is not nearly so simple, and brewing is a far more complicated art than winemaking." In my opinion, comparisons like this diminishes beer's status. It's the dirty politics of smear campaigns and idea theft.

Granted, the wine world has done a great job of establishing a more refined status. The image winemakers have shaped has made consumers look at their beverage with respect. Much of this has to do with how they talk about wine. A while back Field Maloney wrote an article highlighting linguistics role in wines rise to the top of the class. They created a vocabulary that aligned themselves with connoisseurs, not with consumers of another product.

Coffee is not wine. Beer is not wine, either. They all are unique, complex experiences by themselves.

I think beer drinkers, myself included, need to stop calibrating beer against other beverages. Beer stands out with it's own subtleties, nuances, and sensory textures. We should allow our vonacular to highlight the aspects that make it uniquely beer, without trying to justify it with talk about wine. As the cliche says, it's like comparing apples and oranges.