Harder Than You Think

Garth Beyer

I attended my quarterly barrel-aged beer analysis meeting today and we had a new addition to the tasting panel.

To catch you up to speed on what it entails: we blindly taste beer that has been pulled from a variety of barrels and we fill out a very thorough sensory sheet. After we go through them all, we share our feedback out loud about each one.

The newbie? It killed him to share. Every time it was his turn he was doubting himself or comparing his notes to someone else’s or bashing himself for not detecting something everyone else did.

But in this setting, the only wrong answer is no answer. He was right, no matter what he would say, and we had to remind him of that again and again for about 6 of the beers until it got slightly easier for him.

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I talked to a couple of colleagues recently about my bandwidth being stretched to the point of exhaustion. It wasn’t easy for me to do. it was like I was the fella blind tasting beers for the first time. I wanted to doubt myself, compare myself to others, bash myself for not being better.

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Controlling a narrative for ourselves will always be harder than we think. We can know what the right thing to do is. Hell, in the taster’s case, he could be told it four times and two minutes later still go back to his habit, in this case, self doubt.

Always hard, but… always worth it.

Stay Positive & Chase The Worth

Garth Beyer
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