MyShout

The time is now ripe to develop a new language to describe beer, says Tony Jennings

A couple of years ago the lads' mag Maxim ran a review of the lagers they considered the best, in which they described Budvar as being "as smooth as a pimp on a sledge". I was greatly but briefly amused by this Antipodean comment (whoever thought of this one just has to be Australian), and then forgot all about it until my contemplation of the UK's shrinking beer market brought it to mind again. One result of revisiting the pimp has been to convince me that our shrinking beer market is due not to weather or football results, but to a deep-rooted semantic problem.

Let me explain. The pimp route to defining beer, whatever you think of it, is different. Its creator has presented a completely new take on the liquid, making it sound far more interesting and engaging than if it had been described using the conventional language of beer appreciation. Critically, this is nothing more than a dialect of the language used to evaluate and appreciate wine.

There is nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. It provides the essential lingua franca for beer professionals as well as for beer enthusiasts; if nothing else it helps ensure they are talking about the same thing. The problem arises when we are trying to get on side all those drinkers out there who have forsaken beer for other drinks. They are probably unconcerned on any conscious level with appraising the appearance, aroma, taste or after-taste of their preferred beer. They just want to know they are going to enjoy whatever it is they are drinking.

I am convinced that we need to develop a new language to reach these disaffected - one that doesn't suggest that the only way you can understand a beer is by using the language developed for wine. This is because the immediate impression this gives is that because it is using semantic hand-me-downs derived from wine appreciation, beer is somehow a poor relation to wine. This suggests it should be kept for a low status rather than a high-status occasion. I know to some extent speciality and imported beers with pedigree, dispensed and presented with style are successfully challenging this proposition, but progress is probably not fast enough to stop the haemorrhage, and the number of retail outlets that have never had a speciality beer in the cabinet or on the bar far outnumbers those which do stock them.

Concepts like the Beer Academy and organisations like the Campaign for Real Ale and the British Guild of Beer Writers are, in my opinion, doing a magnificent job to further the cause of beer. But I feel we are never going to get the mass revival that the product in all its fascinating forms deserves until we develop a language for understanding it that is unique to beer. Along with a more inclusive language, we need to open up our breweries to more and more visitors to let them see the magic that goes on in transforming hops, malt, yeast and water into something that can touch the divine or evoke that pimp-on-sledge feeling.