Hello all, and welcome to Issue 85 of The Beer Connoisseur Magazine! This issue spends a lot of time in that wonderfully strange middle ground where beer becomes more than “just beer.” It represents a flavor map, a business decision, a piece of infrastructure, a cultural argument, a beloved classic, and occasionally, a very dark liquid that seems to have its own gravitational pull. We begin with sensory analysis, but not in the stiff, clipboard-clutching way the phrase sometimes suggests.