Notes of Denial: Film Critics and Beer Sommeliers Are Basically the Same Person and Neither Will Admit It

We've done something slightly mischievous. We took a paragraph from a recent film review — a well-regarded one, published in a well-regarded outlet — and we swapped out the movie title for a beer name. Then we sent it to three certified cicerones and asked them what they thought of the write-up.

All three said it was pretty solid. One suggested the reviewer was underselling the mouthfeel.

This is not a bit. This is the central and somewhat absurd truth at the heart of two of America's most passionate critical communities: film critics and craft beer evaluators have developed, entirely independently, a remarkably parallel vocabulary for describing complex sensory and aesthetic experiences. They use the same words. They apply the same frameworks. They make the same kinds of arguments. And when you point this out to them, they react with the specific discomfort of someone who has just been told they look exactly like their least favorite cousin.

The Shared Lexicon, Documented

Let's just put the words on the table.

"Notes." Film critics use it constantly — "the film has notes of late Cassavetes," "there are notes of quiet dread throughout the second act." Beer evaluators use it as their fundamental unit of flavor description — "notes of dried cherry," "notes of roasted coffee," "notes of something that might be leather but you'll call it leather anyway because it sounds good."

"Finish." In beer, the finish is what lingers on your palate after you swallow — the tail end of the flavor experience. In film criticism, "the finish" describes how a movie resolves, what emotional or intellectual residue it leaves behind. A film with a "clean finish" wraps up neatly. One with a "long, complex finish" stays with you for days. The metaphor is not accidental. It's the same cognitive operation applied to different inputs.

"Balance." A balanced beer achieves harmony between its competing elements — bitterness, sweetness, acidity, carbonation. A balanced film does the same between tone, pacing, character, and theme. Both communities treat balance as a virtue while simultaneously celebrating the masterworks that deliberately abandon it.

"Complexity." Perhaps the highest compliment in both worlds. A complex beer rewards attention — it reveals different things on different sips, in different contexts, at different temperatures. A complex film does the same across viewings, across the arc of your life, across different critical lenses. In both cases, complexity is distinguished from mere "complication" — the former is meaningful layering, the latter is just a mess.

"Approachable." Both communities use this as a compliment that is also slightly a diss. An approachable beer is easy to enjoy without expertise. An approachable film is accessible to general audiences. Both are fine. Neither is likely to win the award that really matters to the people in the room.

We Asked the Experts. They Hedged Beautifully.

We reached out to several film critics and certified beer professionals across the country and asked them, directly, whether they thought their evaluative frameworks were meaningfully similar. The responses ranged from enthusiastic agreement to diplomatic deflection to one very terse email that just said "these are different things."

The most candid respondents were the ones who had experience in both worlds — film people who also homebrewed, beer professionals who were also serious cinephiles. These folks didn't need much convincing.

"The thing that both require is the willingness to sit with an experience and actually interrogate it," offered one beer educator based in Chicago who also writes occasional film essays for a regional arts publication. "Most people don't do that with either. They watch the movie, they drink the beer, they move on. The ones who are really engaged — critics, sommeliers, whatever you want to call them — they're asking why. Why does this work? Why does this fail? What is this doing to me and how is it doing it?"

A working film critic based in Los Angeles, who asked not to be named because — her words — "I don't want to be the film person who got quoted on a beer website," was more reluctant but ultimately more revealing: "I mean, yes, obviously we're both trying to describe subjective experiences with objective-sounding language and pretend that's not a completely absurd thing to do. That's the whole game. For both of us."

The Deeper Structural Parallel

Beyond vocabulary, the evaluative architecture of both disciplines is strikingly similar. Both operate on a foundation of historical context — you cannot meaningfully evaluate a film without understanding cinema history, and you cannot meaningfully evaluate a beer without understanding brewing tradition and style guidelines. Both reward connoisseurship while maintaining (at least publicly) that they welcome the casual enthusiast. Both have developed formalized rating systems that everyone uses and everyone quietly resents.

Both communities also share a complicated relationship with objectivity. Is the beer actually good, or have you been primed to find it good because of the price, the label, the reputation of the brewery? Is the film actually good, or are you responding to the cultural prestige surrounding it? These are not just beer and film questions — they're questions about the nature of aesthetic judgment itself. Both disciplines are, at their most honest, engaged in the same philosophical project.

Why Neither Side Wants to Admit It

The resistance is understandable, if a little silly. Film criticism carries academic legitimacy — it has university departments, it has Pauline Kael, it has the Library of Congress. Beer evaluation, however sophisticated it has become, is still sometimes dismissed as elaborate justification for drinking. Critics don't want to be lumped in with something that sounds like a hobby. Beer professionals don't want their expertise trivialized by comparison to something that sounds like an opinion column.

But this defensiveness obscures something genuinely interesting: both fields are grappling, in real time, with what it means to evaluate human-made experiences that are simultaneously sensory, emotional, cultural, and aesthetic. That's hard. It requires a vocabulary that doesn't fully exist yet. Both communities are building that vocabulary, largely in parallel, and they're arriving at remarkably similar places.

The Takeaway (Or the Finish, If You Prefer)

Here at Cinema Brewers, we've always operated on the intuition that film people and beer people are more alike than either group tends to assume. This piece is, in some ways, just the documentary evidence for what we already suspected.

The next time you hear a beer reviewer describe a hazy IPA as having "a soft, pillowy mouthfeel with a gentle bitterness that resolves into something almost meditative," don't roll your eyes. That's a film critic's sentence. It's also a perfectly good sentence.

And the next time a film critic tells you a movie has "a clean, dry finish that lingers longer than its runtime," raise a glass. They're one of us.

They just don't know it yet.