Are wine/spirit/cigar/beer snobs full of shit?

>This is contrasted with wine snobs who will assure you that a $1000 bottle of wine is literally 10 times better than a $100 bottle of wine.
This is the part where you go off the deep end making stuff up in order to make yourself seem like you have a meaningful point.

It's meant to be diluted down to the strength of wine with ice cold water and a sugar cube.

When done in this manner, it's pretty good. You'll like it if you like herbal bittersweet drinks, and especially if you like licorice.

However, because absinthe is very misunderstood, many retards in America butcher it by taking it in shots, or lighting it on fire, or other stupid things. If done in this way, it'll probably taste like shit, because it's the equivalent of drinking Everclear with plants in it.

I think the "creamy mouthfeel" is used to describe the thickness of smoke. More full-bodied cigars tend to have really thick, oily smoke that can feel "creamy" I guess while they're in your mouth. But the second it leaves it dries it out so I don't get the point either, I just think that's what they mean by "creamy."

So it's jaegermeister?

>I'm positive that a $60 bottle of Scotch tastes better than a $15 bottle of cheap whiskey

>I just think you're deluding yourself if you're paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars on spirits and wine that will essentially taste the same as their middle- to high-shelf counterparts

Your second comment is how I feel about your first. Evan Williams 1783 is in the $10-20 range and highly rated among the "experts" (just do a search). I've read on some forums of bartenders admitting to pouring it into empty bottles of the more expensive stuff. We'll never know if it's true unless they get caught, but I can believe it. It has all the traits that I'm looking for, at least.

Some people (myself included) get a kick when they get "something for nothing" or as close to it as possible. Quality > quantity? Not always true. I'd rather have 20 bottles of that stuff than a single bottle of something equal in price.

I don't think it's as black and white as you put it. I'm in the wine business. and truth be told people get excited about complex wines with many discernible complimentary flavors and a long finish. To an outsider hearing people talk excitedly about this kind of stuff might sound like total bullshit. And there will always be pretentious types who exaggerate their wine knowledge in an effort to appear more worldly (or wealthy).

But generally there are about 80 distinct flavors wine can have, including tar, leather, smoke and graphite. Talking about that is gonna sound weird to people not in the business who don't hear it everyday.

What money other people spend doesn't concern you. If it makes them happy, and they find value in the price, they'll spend it. You draw your own value and price points based on your budget. That being said, a lot of rich people are pretty thrifty and frugal, as a rule. They don't like being taken advantage of, so business that overcharge kind of inflame them. They'd rather pay for what they're actually getting.

Aging red wine makes a difference in flavor in a big way, as does aging whiskey. Some special small batch microbrews, special additions might require less labels are printed, more hands-on processing time, more expensive hops, and that kind of thing, where you don't make the profit per unit exactly equal like the other stuff...so I'm willing to pay more to try something special or different. I don't think import prices always mean I'll be buying japanese beer when I'm in a japanese restaurant however, I'll just get the best lager on the menu for the price.

Buying aged is not an utter ripoff due to costs involved in that. You lose a lot of whiskey to evaporation btw, I'd wager at 12 years you have half the volume left, and at 25 years, you roughly have 1/10th the original volume left in the cask. You'd assume that they could get 10 bottles for the price of 1, and so yea, there's at least a real explanation for price differences. Here's a pic from what I remember of the Jameson tour but don't quote me on my ratios :P

Kinda. Jaegermeister is really viscous and overly sweet, and just hits you over the head with tons of herbs. Not bad, just different.

Absinthe, on the other hand, is more like drinking a lemonade (if the tartness came from herbs instead of lemons), and within that lemonade there are faint tastes of different herbal or floral notes, primarily anise, fennel, and wormwood.

It's hard to describe, really. So yeah, basically Jaeger if Jaegar was wine.

closer to chartreuse imo

>They'd rather pay for what they're actually getting
Jay-Z routinely spends thousands of dollars for a single bottle of shitty Champagne purely for the fact that it comes in a shiny bottle with diamonds on it.

Jay-Z can probably write some of that cost off on his taxes under "image maintenance".

Things stupid Americans believe:
>Tequila makes me crazy, I totally destroyed my frat house once, never touching tequila again LMAO worms!
>Wine is for middle aged women, everyone who enjoys wine thinks that DRC La Tache is exactly 418,000% better than Guigal CDR because that's the price ratio and wine snobs drink wine to make me feel uncultured
>Scotch is for RRAWWWR self-reliant manly men, except anything aged, balanced, or in any way palatable, MUH LAFROOG makes me a heterosexual man and as you can see from my barely suppressed grimace, I am definitely no fag
>Absinthe makes you trip your balls off, Van Gogh totally drank a bunch and that's why he's a good painter, if I drank a bunch of Absinthe I'd be a good painter too!
>Gin is like pine needles, omg if I wanted to drink pine sol I'd break into the janitor's closet, except Hendricks LMAO It's so good! Not like the other gins!
>Now that we have the new Craft Beer™ Eurofags can no longer make us feel culturally inferior with their fancy sophisticated Heineken, we have the craft beer! Heineken is not fancy! Current year! Stella isn't fancy 2016!
>Sake is gross man, LMAO it's totally like chinese vodka, if I wanted to drink vodka I'd drink vodka, anyone who disagrees with me is weeb
>Fancy vodka is for poseur marketing victims, so I'm gonna brand whore it up with Tit's™ genuine hand-marketed vodka, which is more authentic because it's made of corn! As you can see from my slavish promotion of Tit's™ genuine hand-marketed vodka, I'm totally indie and not at all buying vodka for the brand. Buy your Tit's™ genuine hand-marketed vodka today!

This is the most accurate description of absinthe I've ever seen.

Good on ya, user.

Cost is fundamentally subjective, but I think op is really after how much we think these people are jackasses.

pretty nice get bro, and it wasn't even a shitpost

...

I'm American, I have a license to shitpost about Americans, ESPECIALLY AMERICANS LIKE YOU.

If you have a problem with that you can take it up with the Secretary of Shitposting, appointed by our Lord Caliph B. Hussein Obongo in the year of the Hijra, 1437

I would say its kind if like Raki or Uzo because it has Anise too. But Absinth is way better

Best way to drink it is either mixed with water or you take a spoon full of absinth out of your glass, put a sugarcube in it and burn it until the suger starts to caramelise, then you blow it out and pour it in your glass. This gives it a nice flavour of caramel.
Pro Tier would be a Absinth fountain

Re: evaporation, couldn't they use better barrels?

2/10
trying too hard

>Hefeweizens
>orange peel and coriander
Do you mean belgian whites? Hefes taste of clove and banana.

>Re: evaporation, couldn't they use better barrels?
In the case of Jameson, no. They use recycled casks on purpose, wood casks that once aged sherry. The casks are disassembled, shipped to Ireland and take up a second life. It's not just for sherry flavor, but because a partially charred cask has this amazing wood sugar under the char that only years of soaking will reveal. That is what makes it so smooth. I think Jameson is underappreciated. When the scots were still burning peat and getting smoke and shit in their scotch, the irish had figured out a roman bath kind of system of heating the brick floor from underneath, to roast the groats without actual smoke from open fires. Whether you simply like smoke, like you prefer your smores marshmallow on fire and then blown out, is a matter of present tastes, but in the progression of whiskey, especially whiskeys that concentrate as they age...it was considered pretty vile to drink something that had to taste like an ashtray to produce. Can't find a picture of the roasting room online, but here's one of a coopersmith putting together a sherry cask.

>Jay-Z routinely spends thousands of dollars for a single bottle of shitty Champagne purely for the fact that it comes in a shiny bottle with diamonds on it.
Does this even need a comment? The kind of people who even follow news of Jay-Z, let alone know who he is probably really find it cool that he buys bottles with diamonds of them and that it is financed off their hard earned money to go to shows. As another user said, it's image stuff like that that keeps him relevant. There are a thousand new musicians clamoring for the top, and with a good deal of them having talent but no fame, all publicity is good publicity even negative things. I'm sure no one is looking closely at his taxes at the IRS, only people who have fallings out with Obama have that happen to them. Me? All I know about him is that he went to Cuba for a romantic trip where he used the educational exchange visa illegally and I think he sucks and that's about all I know about him. Even his name is stupid.

Everyone's tastes are different. With this, people may prefer spirits over hops and vice versa.
Same with food though amirite?
When you've tried so many things you just start to prefer one thing over the other. The snobbery is just normal. Everyone's a critic.
>Sensitive senses

OP, even if you get a lot of hate, just know that 99% of people on earth agree with you.

Snobs need to be gassed. "Light notes of fruit and a great foamy mouth feel" directly translates to "it tastes like booze".

Not everyone who gives a shit about nuance in food, wine, whisky and the like is a snob. The problem, especially when it comes to wine is language. Describing a wine in French sounds completely normal and natural, but in English it sounds pretentious as hell. Ity's just one area where our language falls apart.

Except when talking about muh dry hopped mosaic or muh phenols then it's ok to be an insufferable prick

Simple rules: if it's beer or scotch it's not pretentious, it's manly, Ron Swanson said so

And he is a serial style biter who likes like a camel covered in tar

>The problem, especially when it comes to wine is language. Describing a wine in French sounds completely normal and natural, but in English it sounds pretentious as hell. Ity's just one area where our language falls apart.
Best wine reviewer evah is this Jets fan Gary Vaynerchuk with his NYC accent. He might own a wine store can't remember? He's got a 1000 youtube episodes and counting. I trust his palate, and he's not pretentious, does all price points, blind testings, boxed wines, whatever Here's one of them for example:
tv.winelibrary.com/2007/11/30/90-point-wine-and-under-10-how-good-are-they-episode-361/

I'm watching his videos now and I can tell you right now he's still going to be considered pretentious by the kind of tendies-eating fucksticks who frequent this board because:

1. He refers to grape varietals by their correct names
2. He uses specific terminology like "acidity" instead of DUH IT TASTE LIKE WINE
But worst yet
3. He spits
4. He pours some out
How to review wine as approved by Veeky Forums
>It costs $price
>The label looks {stupid/good/pretentious/funny}
>It smells like wine
>It tastes like wine
>Ok, that's my review please click like and subscribe

Oh shit, yeah.

I wasn't aware they were different, but you saying banana makes a ton of fucking sense.

Thanks, user.

This

Maybe there are people who can pick up broad categories like "fruit" or "wood," but nitpicking it down to "dried apricots" or "Spanish cedar" earns you a one-way ticket to the firing squad.

He's a blast, though, watch a few where he has guests, and like I said... I trust his reviews, and like the fact he doesn't agree with other reviewers but nicely :P. I like in the video I linked that he wouldn't personally drink the crap that is flying off his store shelves due to the 90 rating and people should try for themselves.
I actually haven't watched him in a couple of years...but I've never seen him posted here, unbelievably. I guess he's more of a local phenomenon in his region (the accent is hard for other regions to stomach).

At that point, you're just paying the price of showing the rest of society you can afford to pay for expensive food and drink. And they have every right to do so.

>fruit or wood
It's pretty fucking trivial to pick out cherries, lemons, peaches, melons, green apples, and strawberries in wine, and anyone who claims otherwise has not tasted much wine and is just making stuff up to suit an agenda

I've never heard of "Spanish cedar" in wine tasting, you must be thinking cigars

Where things get dodgy is when people claim to be tasting things that are not part of their daily experience. Garrigue is a notorious example, feel free to use that one in the future so you don't make such a fool of yourself

popsugar.com/food/Wine-World-Reels-2-Buck-Chuck-Wins-Award-404101

arsenic wine is better than expensive wine

>broad categories like "fruit" or "wood,"
If you can't pick up cherry on a Burgundy, grapefruit on a Sancerre or lychee on a Gewurztraminer your sense of taste is broken. Whether a particular Chardonnay leans toward green apple, melon, tropical fruit, minerality or buttery-ness is legit. As is whether or not a Champagne evokes toast. (No pun intended).

I'm not clicking on your virus, but the ancient Romans stored wine in lead and it was infamously delicious

Arsenic seems unlikely to have a favorable effect on taste, it's probably a coincidence

Tobacco enthusiast here. I'm pretty sure if anyone describes a "creamy mouthfeel" from smoking hand-rolls or cigars, it's because their mouth is filling up and getting coated with saliva. It happens to me sometimes too, I have no idea what causes it.

>As is whether or not a Champagne evokes toast
This might be an important time to mention that the very same crowd that argues that all wine tastes the same, also argues that if wine has bubbles it's champagne

I don't imagine user has ever actually tasted champagne AOC wine

I always get that "creamy mouthfeel" from smoking those Tabak Especial coffee-infused cigars. I think it happens for me because they taste delicious and make me want a big, strong cup of coffee, and so my mouth salivates in anticipation of delicious tasting things.

>lumping beer in with that other stuff
Th difference between cheap beer and craft beer is immense, and the price difference is pretty fucking small for the vast majority of it

>craft beer
As opposed to what? "Normal beer"?

Are you really not familiar with common terminology or just pretending?

>common
Maybe where you live. Where I'm from we just call it "beer"

lol, ok dude

Your little backwoods town doesn't have a term to differentiate shit beer and good beer? Seems implausible. Are you not a native speaker of english? Is something being lost in translation?

I lumped it in only because in recent years I've noticed a disturbing trend of hipsters trying to turn beer culture into the snobbish, pretentious culture they've created around wine. A local bar recently hosted a "beer tasting" which I (wrongly) assumed would be a bunch of people hanging out drinking a bunch of local craft brews or something.

Boy was I wrong. I walked into the bar and it was literally 2 dozen hipsters wearing bow ties, fake thick rimmed glasses, oxfords and suspenders sipping beer from tulip glasses and spitting it out back into a bucket.

I nearly vomited.

>sipping beer from tulip glasses and spitting it out
Surely this is not true,, I have a hard time imagining even hipsters doing this. Around here it seems craft beer is way too mainstream for hipsters to care much about, its mostly normie 20 something dudes into it

Trust me, it's true. It was mostly a bunch of gimmicky stupid beers that honestly sounded really dumb to me. Agave beer, raspberry beer, chocolate beer, etc. One of the beers main selling points was that their mash (not sure what the fermenting beer is called) was turned by hand and not a machine. Like what the fuck difference does it make?

The term is useless anyway as it refers to a beer produced in batches under an absurdly high number of hectaliters so even a beer that seems macrobrewed can be "craft". It really just comes down to good beer versus shit beer and it doesn't take a connoisseur to tell the difference

Aeration is pretty important at that stage, but it's probably just as bullshit as it seems

You live in a shit place. These days serious beer guys are halfway as serious as serious wine guys. They ought to be pouring good beer enthusiastically, even if it's a little expensive.

The term craft beer is a little ambiguous, but its certainly not useless

OP BTFO.

It's not ambiguous. There's been a legal line drawn. It just makes you sound like an unaware puss if you say "craft beer". Sam Adams is craft beer.

> being this thirsty for a sense of superiority

There is no legal line. The Brewers Association has a specific definition (which they have changed several times to accommodate Sam Adams), but it is not legally enforceable in any way, and the use amongst general english speakers varies a little

but yeah, Sam Adams is craft beer, though it is on the edge. Craft beer is more about the philosophy used in designing the recipe than it is about the number of barrels produced to the typical beer drinker

I do find it doubtful that spirits or wine get much better after the $100 mark. that is, that a $300 bottle would be significantly better than a $100 bottle, and very doubtful about $1000 bottles. Although I've never had better than $100 Scotch.

Anyone here tried really expensive spirits? like $500-$1000?

Word mein negro. Brewing a hefe actually produces the compound that gives nanners their flavor. That's why it literally can taste like bananas, especially if it's fermented at too high of a temperature.

I really wish there was a place to talk cigars and pipes on 4ch but it doesn't really fit anywhere except /b/. Closest place I guess would be here as it's an aromatic consumable, but I doubt the janitors would let it slide.

If the thread started off without people flinging shit, it'd stay I'm sure. Frame it by pairing it with alcohol or something and let the thread devolve into just cigars.

>wine snobs will assure you that a $1000 bottle of wine is literally 10 times better than a $100 bottle of wine.

I believe this is an assumption you're making. The quality doesn't neatly correlate with the price such that it's X times better where X = expensive bottle price/cheaper bottle price. It's not even possible to quantify quality of taste like that anyway.

>if you don't look, talk, think, eat, drink, dress, walk, live, and feel EXACTLY the way I do, you are not a native speaker of English but a member of all Qaeda who actively seeks to destroy America and all that she stands for
WIDF detected

check out 420ch's tobacco board /smoke/.

For the most part, taste is pretty subjective. People experience taste differently from everyone else.

>420chan

No ty

I've said it before here but anyway. Below a certain price all wine is horrible. Above a certain price it will be nice but you are paying for the label.

The middle ground is where you want to be. In my experience below $12 is bad and above $75 there is no appreciable difference whatever the grape.

I agree with you to an extent because although I buy nice wine because I like to drink it, certain pairing with food are worth paying more. The same limits apply though.

>above $75
Unless you're including the more esoteric stuff where the wine making is as important as the grape itself (certain fortified wines, botrytis wines, straw wines, etc), I'd change that cutoff to be more like $50 and that's being generous

Although I guess if you allow for aftermarket values and assume wine has to be purchased and consumed without long-term storage, I guess $75 is fair

All alcohol tastes like fucking shit

It's All just a manner of masking the industrial solvent taste and oesphegous burn

I'm a full blown ducking alcoholic and the alcohol that ever razed good were giant cocktails with just like one half ass rip off shot in there that I couldn't taste

Alcohol is disgusting, fucking all of it yuck

Wine rotten grape, beer rotten grain, cider rotten apple, spirit concetration of rot

Rot swill goon booze

Alcohol is fucking yuck the only people who think it taste good are alcoholics like me who are merely misattributing the drug effect of ethanol to the flavour of the swill through extensive and repeated training, either that or they're pretentious fuckigit snobs muh wine muh Syrah muh fucking rose muh cinnamon notes mmmm this industrial solvent which causes liver failure brain damage and death sure tastes good when it's diluted to 40% concetration combined with fuckigit wood barell water muh notes muh fucking mouthfeel

Would you eat rotten grapes? But people act like they enjoy it when it cumms from a fancy fucking expensive bottle witha some French bullshit name

And fuck you op yellowtail is decent and there is LITERALLY no correlation between price paid and degree of disgust one feels, none at all

I'm not just saying this I've tried shit like dom perryfuck expensive brandy expensive muh single fucking malt get fucked

Pass the fuckin goonsak cunt alcohol is a drug and I'm here for the best fucking deal which is either goon cheap vodka depending price or hobo beer you know like the 10% shit no 40s here tho

I hate everyone who pretends to enjoy the taste of alcohol seething fucking hatred spit venom and pure lava in their faggot fucking cunt faces how's hat for a fuckijng mouthfeel cunt I'll jam a screwdriver in your fucking rose hip note pallet cunt fucking cunt spit spit in your face cunt hoick

>I'm a full blown ducking alcoholic and
Yes, we can tell

...

Basically, as with most things, alcohol has a rule of diminishing returns. A $30 bottle of wine is likely vastly better than a $10 bottle. Most anyone with any interest in wine will be able to say the one is better than the other (although there are always exceptions- I'm just talking generally). A $50 bottle of wine is probably better than a $30 one, but not as much. People who don't care as much about wine will likely feel that this price jump isn't really worth it. If you then go up to, say, a $100 bottle, generally the difference is even more subtle. It likely comes down to more complexity or a bit more unique flavors. As you continue to go up on price, the amount you have to pay to get any improvement goes up as well. It starts to be more about the prestige and scarcity, and people increasingly buy to show off or collect.

As far as the idea that picking flavors out in wine/spirits is pretentious in some way, I totally disagree. It just takes some practice. The flavors you're finding- or approximate analogues of them- are there, in the form of various organic compounds (esters, phenols etc) produced during fermentation and aging. You're just trying to put an identity to the flavors you're getting, to describe the aroma and flavor.

Pretty much every barrel loses content to evaporation over time. It's even worse for bourbon, because it tends to be hotter where it's aged. You can lose almost half your barrel in 10 or 15 years. No matter how good your barrels are- and, being watertight, they're pretty good- you can't stop it because wood is porous. It's what makes it good for aging but it also causes this content loss.

I went to a whisky tasting yesterday and tried my first smokey Islay. The idea of smokey whisky always sounded kind of stupid to me, but by God if that wasn't one of the best things I've ever tasted. Unfortunately, I'm too poor to be able to afford a bottle.

user, it's kind of a sham, but it's a way for people to spend a lot of money. You can spend exorbitant amounts on anything, because there will always be a demand for luxury.

>Uh oh looks like you just B yourself TFO, who's full of shit now, huh? Huh?

Is this what Veeky Forums autism looks like