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Interlude no. 2 - Learning beer reviewing


It has been a joyous journey so far, this beer reviewing and blogging journey of mine. I have reviewed - or at least had/drank/enjoyed 73 different beers so far as recorded in this blog. It has usually been nice and fun way of drinking the beer, that I enjoy with or without blogging. There have been some times during the blogs' short era (five months), that I had no interest in writing anything, so some beers like very odd "Puolukka Stout" by Sinebrychoff (Fin) or very pleasant and tasty "Winter Porter" from Stallhagen (Fin), have been left unreviewed at the time of drinking. But like I said in the introduction "Every beer deserves a story", so let this be a story of those unmentioned ones. Cheers!

At the beginning of my blog era, I had a certain sense of beer varieties, but now, after only five months of my expedition throughout the beer world, I have been stunned with the tastes and scents and aromas of beers formerly unknown to me. A friend recommended me some Imperial IPA:s (mainly excellent BrewDog's "Hardcore IPA" and some other brewerys' DoubleDog IPA, which is yet to be reviewed) and at first I didn't even know what IPA meant :) Now I know. Sounds stupid to start a beer blog without the basic beer knowledge, but I thought it doesn't matter - and I think so, yet now.

I am not a wizard in beer vocabulary, so that I often don't understand or can not sense the scents and smells and tastes that other more exprienced tasters do. I, personally, don't usually find cinnamon, grass, orange, berries or what-the-fuck-ever in most of the beers that are said to have those scents or tastes, but I have for example tasted very heavily chocolate in London Porter or some other scents occasionally. Most of the time I just smell, taste and drink my beer with the sense of it being either good, not so good or sometimes even great. It would be easier, perhaps, to have some kind of well-known scale that beer reviewers seem to use (like 50 points scale or school scale of 4-10 or scale of 1-10). There would be more comparability then and obviously some more differences in my review-positioning. I mean, if there are maybe 30+ beers or so now in my blog with the review of "*** OK", then how can they be separated? And are they all "just" OK, or what? My OK is actually maybe 8 in school scale, **** Great is 9 and ***** Absolutely fabulous is 10.

Comparing my reviews to the ones of the real beer enthusiasts and gurus, would be nonsense, though. My Abso fab's for example, are my "all-time-favorites". They may not be the most enjoyable beers in every situation in life, they may lack character, taste or smell of some really spectacular beers that exist, but they still mean something special to me. Actually they are above or rather outside the scale. I have had one new favorite during this blog's five month life span and it is Finnish Malmgård's Brewery's "Huvila E.S.B." It just is fucking great beer and I have named it "the best bottled beer in Finland" - though I haven't had all of them. There are many Finnish beers, I would love to have sometime, mainly Pori-based Beer Hunter's brewery's "Mufloni", "Intianpässi", "Plevna" and such. There are also other beers brewed locally but not distributed throughout Finland or are sold only in restaurants, but I just do the drinking and blogging with my own experience.

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