Four Brewers: Craft Beer and Homebrew · John Holzer, Greg Nagel, Joe Senigaglia, Jason Harris

365: It's Not Too Shidy

·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

Greg says the oldest beer is from January, then describes a warm can as a brown flavor column.

The show opens with the usual table banter and a quick correction spiral about what they actually bought. They had planned a Kolsch-themed episode, but they couldn't get their shit together in time, so they grabbed a 15-pack of Oscar Blues from Total Wine instead. The panel immediately starts comparing the beers to the dates on the cans. One person has a can from December, another from January, and another from February, and that old stock becomes both the joke and the complaint. From there, the tasting gets blunt fast. One beer reads as all lime and too much of it. Someone else gets a salty hit that feels off. Another voice calls the texture soft and flabby, which sends the table into the usual short, overlapping argument about whether it is crisp, dry, tart, or just kind of a mess. Nobody tries to polish it up. They keep circling the same beer until the flaws are impossible to miss. The conversation then veers into old Oscar Blues can design. They remember the printed hole-and-screen setup that used to make the cans feel like a tiny piece of stoner engineering. They talk about the little joke text that used to show up on cans and notice that some of the newer packaging has changed. That turns into a broader riff about what gets lost when a brewery drops its old weird touches. The panel keeps snapping back to the beer itself, though. The lime character keeps getting singled out as overdone. The salinity keeps landing odd. One person thinks the beer is dry, another thinks it is too flabby to hold the flavors together, and the disagreement stays rooted in the actual drinking. That is the show at its best: half conversation, half verdict, with the verdict usually louder. Once the packaging tangent starts to burn out, the table goes harder into the absurdity of smoking weed out of an aluminum can. They question whether that is a good idea at all. They compare it to desperate high-school improvisation and start describing busted-together hardware-store pipe parts. The whole thing has that familiar Four Brewers rhythm where a beer complaint opens a door to some unrelated memory, then the memory gets laughed through until they find their way back. Even with the chaos, the episode stays centered on a real tasting experience. The freshness issue matters. The mix-pack format matters. The beer's balance, or lack of it, matters. The show sounds like people talking over each other at a table, but the knowledge underneath is still there, and it keeps the whole mess from turning into random noise.

As heard by us

Loose beer talk around a mix pack, with freshness, lime, and salinity doing most of the work.

Four Brewers spends this episode on a mix pack after the planned Kolsch show falls through, and that detour keeps the talk anchored in the beer itself.

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Why you'd press play

You want a scrappy beer panel that keeps circling back to a salty, tart lime beer and the mess around it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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