Which Beers Belong in a "Hall of Fame?"
Last week, major league baseball announced its 2021 slate of inductees into the Hall of Fame. Or rather, announced that no one got in. This year’s ballot was especially contentious, and not because no candidate has built an adequate resume. Indeed, the best hitter in the past 50 years, one of the best pitchers, and another acknowledged great were all passed over because of steroid use and/or being jackasses. No club has gotten closer to “objective” criteria than baseball’s Hall, and even they’re a mess. So naturally it made me wonder: which beers would we put in the World Beer Hall of Fame if such a thing existed. And what would those beers say about us?
As thought experiments went, this one turned out to be quite engaging. I threw this question out on Twitter to get your juices flowing:
“You are placed on a committee building a world beer hall of fame and you’ve been asked to designate the first inductees. Which ten world beers, current or historical, do you induct first?”
I didn’t offer any criteria or further guidelines. I was just curious to see what you’d come up with.
It’s a question designed to provoke debates, and it did. Baseball voters prize longevity and the career stats it brings. Sustained excellence is critical. A player like two-time Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum was the best pitcher in baseball for four years and never sniffed the Hall. Below I’ll detail the results, which, as in baseball include some agreement at the top, and then a lot of fascinating detail that revealed hidden insights, blind spots, and biases. So how did you think about this? Let’s go to the results.
Most-Cited Beers
Though the answers were a bit ragged, about 58 of you gave a response. Most offered ten, some fewer, and a few more. I noted most of them down, though in some cases (“a London porter”) I had to punt. Of those 58 ballots, here are the ones that garnered the most mentions:
A majority of you chose a descendant the most successful extant example of the first international style (porter), and an equal number of the originator of the second international style (pilsner). A lot of you also noted the importance of hops in our current marketplace, and either chose the original pale ale (Bass) or the one most responsible for launching the American style (Sierra Nevada). After that, there’s a pretty big drop-off, but a logic is emerging. You favor classics of a style that have been around a long time and are regularly regarded as exceptional beers. You nod to history and influence, including indirect influence, as when a dozen of you cited Carlsberg, presumably for that brewery’s pioneering work isolating a pure yeast culture. The most recent beer of the top ten, Sierra Nevada Pale, is forty years old.
For the completists out there, I’ll list all the beers receiving multiple votes at the bottom of this post.
Sample Characteristics
Collectively, you cited 126 beers in total, though 74 of those got only one vote. Across all responses, 471 beers were cited, but the twenty most-cited beers garnered almost two-thirds of the votes. That indicates a surprisingly impressive amount of agreement. As I scanned the lists, I would see a familiar pattern: many of the beers would be historic classics, but a few would be idiosyncratic, often personal choices. That’s not only reasonable, but expected—we see that in the MLB voting as well. In fact, it can be important. No one cited Bass among the first ten or so responses, but then it started appearing regularly. Now a property of AB InBev and a footnote among English ales, it had a huge impact on British and American brewing. It took a while for someone to mention Dreher’s original Vienna Lager, too, and then it started picking up votes as well.
I noticed that a lot of you were choosing various Trappist ales, but they were spread around a bit. This makes sense—Orval, Westmalle, Rochefort 10 and Westvleteren 12 are all different kinds of beers. Which would you select? I wondered about style selection then, and whether we could discern which you considered more “important.” That wasn’t easy to do, because just counting beers cited in a style skewed things. There is no ur-IPA the way there is an ur-pilsner (the one with Ur in its name), and so people mentioned a bunch of different ones. So while you only cited four pilsners, they collectively received a lot more votes (43) than IPAs (28), even though people mentioned 15 of them.
There were definite biases, particularly in terms of countries represented. Americans, the majority of my followers on Twitter, tended to overvalue American beers. (I didn’t submit a list myself, but only one might make my list—Sierra Nevada. Everything else is too recent to evaluate. Recall that had I conducted this in 1995, Pete’s Wicked would have made a lot of lists.).
Belgium, Germany, and Britain all tied for the number of beers cited (22, or 17% of all beers mentioned) but Belgium far outperformed its European rivals in terms of total mentions. What’s going on there is interesting. Belgium has a focused market, with a number of classic beers from old breweries that stand out. Germany, by contrast, has a lot more breweries making good beer with no single dominant player. It’s easy to identify “the” classic strong Belgian pale (Duvel)—but what about a German pils? There’s no equivalent. There are fewer famous German pilsners because there are so many of them. That’s not great for Hall of fame performance, but it represents a healthier market.
Finally, the list also points to what you consider excellence. What’s the beer equivalent of Babe Ruth? Not, apparently, a kölsch. You cited only two, and each got only one vote. People buy a lot more kölsch than they do roodbruins (Rodenbach and Verhaeghe), yet you favored the latter. I would have to consider that long and hard. Why do we value strong ales more than weak ones, Belgian ales more than British or German ones? Is it because those are the glamor beers, the “expected” ones? Plenty of you cited relatively low-status beers like Carlsberg and Budweiser, but neglected excellent beers in other, apparently low-status styles. It’s worth considering why we value the beers we do—especially those we don’t drink often.
Discussion
I suspect the World Beer Hall of Fame works better as thought experiment than an actual entity. Beer Twitter was magnetized by it, but would regular citizens be equally curious? One commenter did offer a great suggestion that might make the actual WBHoF marginally valuable: having a branch in every country.
One drawback to the whole concept is that it favors commercial success, regional influence, and critically, non-traditional, commercial products. A few people noted down choices like “a gruit beer,” or “traditional African beer.” It’s hard to know how to honor them. Yet the branch hall of fame in Kinshasa would highlight that influence, and visiting would be a far different experience than dropping in at the one in Munich. It would add a museum element that would inform as well as celebrate. If you wanted to create an all-time list, you could draw from the regionals.
But beyond those downsides, it’s possible to see contours of criteria develop by looking at these results. For the people on Beer Twitter, at least, history, style, and influence all play a big role. Those who weighed in were impressively educated, and while I haven’t sat down to develop my own criteria and assign beers to meet it, I suspect most of my beers have already been mentioned by at least one of you.
It was a fun experiment, and I hope you found it edifying (even you, Stan). I did.
All Beers Receiving Multiple Citations:
Eleven votes: Budweiser, Rodenbach Grand Cru, Goose Island Bourbon County Stout. Ten: Westvleteren 12, Cantillon Gueuze, Allagash White. Nine: Sam Adams Boston Lager, Duvel, Schlenkerla (Märzen) Eight: Russian River Pliny the Elder, Hoegaarden. Seven: Klein-Schwechat Märzen (Dreher’s original Vienna Lager), Heady Topper. Six: Westmalle Tripel. Five: U Fleků. Four: Miller Lite, Heineken, New Albion Ale, Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. Three: Watney's Red Barrel, Fuller's London Pride, Fuller's ESB, Bell's Two Hearted, Bud Light, Fuller's London Porter, Barclay Perkins Porter, Boulevard Tank 7, Courage Russian Imperial Stout. Two: Rochefort 10, Paulaner Oktoberfest, Harvey's Sussex Bitter, Timothy Taylor Landlord, Paulaner Salvator, Spaten Dunkles, Corona, Boon Mariage Parfait, Cantillon Fou Foune, Boon Oude Geuze, Gale's Old Prize Ale, Deschutes Black Butte Porter, Anchor Porter, Verhaeghe Duchesse De Bourgogne, Mackeson Sweet Stout.