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by Tom Vanderbilt

  Could there be a universally good beer—or cat? The philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, suggested that our liking of merely “agreeable” things like wine (or beer or cats) was hopelessly subjective:

  A violet color is to one soft and lovely, to another dull and faded. One man likes the tone of wind instruments, another prefers that of strings. To quarrel over such points with the idea of condemning another’s judgment as incorrect when it differs from our own, as if the opposition between the two judgments were logical, would be folly. With the agreeable, therefore, the axiom holds good: every one has his own taste (that of sense).

  Taste judgment, Kant said, can only be “pure so far as its determining ground is tainted with no merely empirical delight.” And so while the cat show or beer festival judges were, in one sense, acting in a “disinterested” Kantian fashion, suspending their own preferences for the sake of a larger set of criteria, the very fact that they had put criteria on the things they were judging, for Kant, rendered their judgments suspect. To fix these “rules”—“like all empirical rules, general only, not universal”—on the beauty of a human, a building, or a horse, argued Kant, is to “presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty.” As the philosopher Matt Lawrence puts it, paraphrasing what Kant might have said about beer, “There is something about these beers themselves that makes them great.” Not because of the reasons someone says they are great.

  What Kant was trying to do, in his famously thorny and “forbidding” text, notes the Kant scholar Christian Wenzel, was to resolve the very dilemma I sensed was cropping up in the notion of shifting aesthetic standards: Was taste subjective or objective? “On the one hand,” Wenzel notes, “the pleasure involved in a judgment of taste cannot be completely subjective. Otherwise, the claim that everyone should agree could never be justified; such a claim could not even arise and there would not be any quarrel in matters of taste.”

  So people cannot simply describe a cat or beer as good, for what would that mean, and how would we know which one was better? But “the grounds for pleasure in aesthetic contemplation cannot be completely objective either,” notes Wenzel, “because then quarrels in matters of taste could be settled in a scientific fashion (as in physics).” A machine could tell you which beer was better. Taste—capital-T taste, the sort that conveys a judgment on what you are tasting—seems to occupy some hazy middle ground. What the apparatus of judging seems to do is to give people a way to talk about taste without really talking about taste, or at least anybody’s individual taste.

  —

  So what is a good beer? I put the question to a small group of judges at the end of the festival’s first day after they had endured many rounds of tasting. Appropriately—or curiously, perhaps—the conversation took place over beers, pilsners from Left Hand Brewing. “Judging takes a lot of concentration,” Jamie Floyd, the tattooed, spiky-haired, and perpetually energetic owner of Ninkasi Brewing, based in Eugene, Oregon, told me. “It is good to have a nice clean pilsner in front of you.”

  What the judges first wanted me to know was that as analytical as they tried to be, at the end of the day they are humans, with human predilections. “We start out trying to be very objective, judging to these parameters of the style of criteria,” said Brad Kraus, the rangy, cowboy-hat-wearing maestro cervecero at the Panamanian brewer La Rana Dorada. “But you have to be a little subjective, otherwise a machine could do this.” A beer might hit all of the style guidelines, but was it actually a good beer? “Our brewery has an analytical lab and a sensory lab,” added Floyd. “We have both of them—because lab equipment doesn’t drink beer.”

  While Shanteau had told me one of the hallmarks of experts was convincing others they were experts, I sensed that the judges were surprisingly forthcoming in their own insecurity. I had noted that the setup of the stout judging panel had felt to me like a poker game: people grouped around a circular table trying to look as innocuous as possible as they studied what was in front of them (the beers are shuffled so facial gestures do not give away their “hand”).

  Fal Allen, brewmaster of Anderson Valley Brewing Company, bearded and with a scholarly mien, said judges often begin by pointing out flaws. This may be because flaws are detected first by the human sensory apparatus. But there is also the idea that it may be easier to point out flaws than to defend vaguely positive qualities. “I said that today—‘I like this beer.’ Someone said, ‘Yeah, what do you like about it?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, now I am going to have to explain myself in front of these experts—am I going to say something stupid?’ Sometimes it’s easier to just pick out the bad things.”

  If there are any number of ways to be swayed at the judging table—by the beer you had before, by the temperature of the room or of the drink, by what every judge seems to be saying—in the real world the question of why we are liking a beer at any one moment is infinitely complex. Indeed, it may have little to do with the beer itself. Judges drink in a way that no one else does: anonymously, in relatively small amounts, paying attention only to what is being consumed, not for pleasure but with a purpose. Judges will eat a piece of chocolate or sniff their arms to “reset” their palates between brews; who does that in a bar? “When you’re in a crowded bar, that beer can get away with a lot,” Floyd said. “There’s music, there’s people you’re attracted to, there’s odors, there’s bad karaoke. You could have a beer three or four times and have a pretty mellow impression of it. But then you’re in a situation when you’re really focusing on it, and you’re like, ‘What did I ever like about that beer?’ ”

  The week before, I tell the judges, I had downed a dollar can of Pabst Blue Ribbon at a ramen restaurant in Brooklyn. I had probably not had a Pabst since college nor felt compelled to seek one out. But Pabst, through a rather accidental process, has enjoyed, beginning in the first decade of the twenty-first century, spectacular growth—in 2009, it posted a 25.9 percent increase in sales—so much so that its price a few years later in local bars was actually rising. Its popularity, as the writer Rob Walker has chronicled, seems to have been driven by a peculiar, law-of-supply-and-demand-subverting combination of low price, relative scarcity, and a discreet marketing campaign that had tried to seize upon the beer’s perceived “authenticity” without alienating the longtime drinkers who lent it that authenticity. Its actual taste, at least judged by the thousands of people who have weighed in on RateBeer.​com, is described in grudging, almost apologetic terms: “a decent lawn mower beer”; good “for standing in the crowd at a concert”; the “perfect college student brew, to drink while cranking out an essay.” For the record, Pabst has actually won the American Light Lager category at GABF, but one judge told me, fairly snickering, “How could it not?”

  —

  But drinking the Pabst had left me wondering: What did it mean to drink a blander beer when there were so many others out there? Was I able to enjoy it “for what it was” by calibrating my top-down expectations accordingly? And how does this differ from the experience of a regular Pabst drinker who is suddenly served a craft beer, the likes of which he had never had? Is sensory pleasure only experienced in relation to knowledge, or could it flourish on its own? The most naive response is to think that the non-craft consumer would be immediately transported by the inherently superior taste, that he would suddenly think, “My God, why have I been drinking that other stuff all my life?”

  One occasionally encounters the phrase “gateway beer” in the craft world. It is the beer that first “got you into” beer, a starter brew: not too extreme, perhaps a more robust version (with better ingredients) of something you might have already drunk. Once, this might have been Heineken; now maybe it is Sam Adams. Simply drinking a gateway beer, however, is unlikely to set one off on the road to connoisseurship.

  Because the power of top-down conditioning will have primed him on what to expect, and thus like, in a beer
, the drinker may simply be unable to enjoy a novel or strange brew as beer. Our senses do not respond well to violated expectations. “If you give someone a Guinness for the first time,” says Fal Allen, “they’re not going to be prepared for what that’s going to be. They taste it and go, ‘Whoa, what’s going on?’ You should say, ‘It’s not going to be like your beer. It’s going to be chocolaty, and you should look for the espresso note.’ When they taste it, they’re more open to it.” The presentation, Floyd added, must not be “about changing your life.” Do not slam down the expensive Trappist ale and declare, as he puts it, “I’m never going to see a Coors can in your house after this! That’s not really going to work out so well.”

  But what happens when the drinker passes through the gateway? In a discussion of the philosophical concept qualia—“the way things seem to us”—the philosopher Daniel Dennett speaks of two hypothetical coffee tasters working at Maxwell House. After six years’ work, they secretly confess to each other that they no longer like the coffee. But they disagree on why. One says his standards have changed and that he is a better judge of coffee. He no longer likes the taste of Maxwell House. The other thinks something in his perceptual system has changed: The “coffee doesn’t taste to me the way it used to.” If it did, he would still like it. Dennett concludes that “we may not be able to settle the matter definitely,” and perhaps, as with the idea of the “flavor object,” there is something to both explanations: Some “internal brain image” of the coffee is interacting, across a number of neural networks, with the body’s sensory receptors. How could one’s standards not change if one’s senses had changed (they get “more” from the coffee), and how could changing one’s standards not change one’s senses (to look for something “more”)?

  Whatever has happened to the coffee tasters, something changed. Which raises the question, per the gateway beer, of what happens when you go “back.” When I drank the Pabst, did I enjoy it? If yes, was I enjoying it for the way it tasted now? Or was it knowing how much money I was saving; the curious hipster aura it possessed; or perhaps even feeling temporarily liberated from the work and weight of connoisseurship, of just indulging in the simpler tastes?

  The brewmaster Garrett Oliver, a devoted gourmand, had told me during our talk that if someone had walked in bearing a bag of White Castle cheeseburgers, “I could demolish, like, ten of them. My opinion is not very high of White Castle cheeseburgers, but this does not alter the fact that when I was kid, this was one of the best things you could ever eat.” But it will never taste as good as he remembers. As Dennett says, when we revisit childhood spaces (our bedroom, our backyard), they seem so much smaller. Our memory fails our current standard for what is big and what is small. You cannot drink that Pabst the way you once did, any more than you can currently inhabit your childhood room in the body and mind of the child you were.

  But having gone through that gateway, is one just presented with an endless, Escher-style series of ever more gateways? Do people become happier because they are able to experience more kinds of beers, more kinds of pleasures, or do they risk a hedonic hangover? “In Oregon, 38 percent of all draft beer is craft,” Floyd observed. “There’s a lot of knowledge out there. There’s also a lot of really unhappy beer lovers. They don’t have anything nice to say anymore. The only reflection they have about beer now is about what isn’t perfect to them anymore. I think sometimes this can happen: They become so biased about what is right that they lose focus about what they got excited by to begin with.”

  It is an open question as to who is happier: the person who only drinks one beer (even one that is judged to be merely adequate) and is barely aware of the beers he is missing, or the questing connoisseur who has drunk almost everything and might be aware that the thing he is drinking in the moment is not the best thing out there. Brad Kraus suggested a pragmatic, middle-ground strategy that seemed, in its humble way, to be a grand strategy for a happy life: “People often ask me, ‘What’s your favorite beer?’ I don’t have a favorite beer. I usually say it’s the one in my hand. It’s what sounded good to me.”

  * * *

  * This question to my mind needs one more piece of information: Just how far is “out of the way”?

  CONCLUSION

  TASTING NOTES

  HOW TO LIKE

  The picture of taste I have presented is hardly reassuring. We often do not seem to know what we like or why we like what we do. Our preferences are riddled with unconscious biases, easily swayed by contextual and social influences. There is less chance than we think that we will like tomorrow what we liked today and even less chance of remembering what led us to our previous likes. Even experts, as we have just seen, are hardly infallible guides to knowing what is truly good, to knowing their own feelings. Nothing could be more essential to identity than one’s internal compass of liking—of food, of music, of art, of our brand of yogurt—and yet, throughout its almost constant operation, it sits largely outside reflection. In the course of our explorations, however, small themes have emerged, little signposts dotting a confusing, difficult path, offering encouragement and a bit of clarity. It is with these messages that I will end—a sort of “field guide to liking” in a world of infinite variety.

  YOU WILL KNOW WHAT YOU LIKE OR DO NOT LIKE BEFORE YOU KNOW WHY. Our ability to express an “affective judgment” about something happens in the range of milliseconds. This is a great skill for a complex world, a filtering mechanism for efficiently navigating the crowded marketplace of life. But shortcuts can come at a price: We may miss what we might really prefer, we may discount something we will later come to love, we may be misattributing the source of our liking.

  GET BEYOND “LIKE” AND “DISLIKE.” In the world of sensory testing, the words “like” and “dislike” are discouraged. Why? Because they may throw off the very judgment of taste panelists. Liking and disliking can be top-down concepts that often get in the way of our actual experience of something. Asking whether you like something or not often puts a premature end to a much more interesting conversation.

  DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU LIKE WHAT YOU LIKE? Remember the subjects at the country fair who seemed to have a decided preference for one of two seemingly identical ketchups? Their preference was unconscious, buried deep in childhood memory. We like to think our likes are authentic, but they may be covertly influenced by context (that bottle of Italian wine you bring home because it was the best thing you ever tasted) or tempered by expectation (people will like the Napa Valley wine more than the New Jersey wine, regardless of where the wine is actually from). One’s individual tastes may simply reflect some larger cultural “frame” that has hardened into habit: As the researcher Evgeny Yakovlev has noted, for decades Russians had an overwhelming taste for vodka (which was relatively cheap and plentiful). Once market restrictions were lifted, however, beer consumption soared—among younger consumers. The old vodka drinkers? They still mostly drank vodka.

  TALK ABOUT WHY YOU LIKE SOMETHING. Language can unlock liking. When we have a sensory experience, we might think it sufficient to let the senses do their work. “Words cannot describe” is a common refrain in online reviews. But if we like what we know, we only know what we remember, and we are more likely to remember hedonic events if we verbalize them. Caution: sometimes we may like something less for itself than because it is easier to talk about why we like it, over something we may actually prefer but whose qualities are more elusive.

  WE LIKE THINGS MORE WHEN THEY CAN BE CATEGORIZED. Our pattern-matching brains are primed to categorize the world, and we seem to like things the more they resemble what we think they should. Studies have found that when subjects look at pictures of mixed-race people and are asked to judge their attractiveness, the answer depends on what categories are used; a Chinese-American man may be judged more attractive than men in general but less attractive than Chinese men. Things that are “hard to categorize” are hard to like—until we invent new categories. We like things more when we can categorize t
hem, and categories can help us like things more, even things that aren’t as good as we might like.

  DO NOT TRUST THE EASY LIKE. As we crave fluency and mastery, we may immediately respond favorably to things that are “easy to get”—a simple but infectious pop riff, a piece of art whose meaning or style immediately registers, a sweet cocktail. But this very fluency may linger less in memory, and we may tire rapidly of the simple “stimulus.” What seems harder to like at first—because it seems to require more mental bandwidth—may yield more long-term hedonic returns. There are few historical artists still relevant today who were widely liked, without any controversy, in the time they were working.

  YOU MAY LIKE WHAT YOU SEE, BUT YOU ALSO SEE WHAT YOU LIKE. As much as we interpret the world through our senses, we prime our senses to interpret the world that we think should be out there.

  LIKING IS LEARNING. There are very few inherent tastes. What is taken for a “natural” predilection is often culture, wrapped in biology’s clothing.

  WE LIKE WHAT WE EXPECT TO LIKE; WE LIKE WHAT WE REMEMBER. The novelist Julian Barnes, channeling Flaubert, called anticipation “the most reliable form of pleasure,” for it cannot be dashed before it happens. Memory provides a similar safe haven; we rarely revise our remembered pleasures. Liking “in the moment” is often up for grabs, a burst of neural activity that could go either way.