Everyone has their opinion.
Not any unusual take on rice finishing, although purely subjective.
When it comes to comparisons to piss, that is a common estimation concerning the skunkiness of many of the ‘premium’ German and Czech beers. I’m not in the business of telling other people that they don’t know what tastes good to them.
When it comes to refined pallets, the beer drinkers of the late 19th century would greatly disagree with you, as they were moving away from what had been the common heavy beers, which they considered unrefined.
I’m also not sure what the value of judging other peoples tastes is. If they like it, they like it. Some people love Twinkies and are no less satisfied than a person eating a $12 piece of cake with a nice sour cream frosting, why should I care?
Like scotch, I like most beer recipes and dislike a few. Its more an issue of time and place for me than trying to determine an all around best. On a 95 degree afternoon, I’ll take a light beer over a stout, in fact, I would pass on my favorite stout altogether.
It’s not just heaviness but overall flavor. Bud’s brewmeisters admit Bud has been steadily reducing the overall level of flavor. Beer can be flavorful without being heavy, that’s part of what the whole pale section (lager, or ale) is all about, summer beers that don’t land in your gut like lead but are still flavorful. Although the IPA revolution has kind of over corrected that worshiping bitter over other subtler flavors. Luckily I live close to Mexico and have a steady supply of less aggressive beers.
It’s not value judging other people’s tastes. It’s value judging a culture’s tastes. For a long time the American palette just stank, we managed to make McDonald’s and Denny’s the most successful restaurants in the world, there were issues. Nothing really shows the problem our palette had so much as instant coffee, nobody liked the stuff, and yet everybody drank it, instant sales were so high (especially once we got microwaves) regular drip coffee companies were going under. We got to a point where we were willing to eat and drink stuff we didn’t like for the sake of convenience almost to exclusion. That was the real sign of the problem with our palette, we knew what we were getting was bad, we didn’t even like it, but we bought so much of it better products were going under. Individual people should get what they want, but when a culture as a whole is buying mostly stuff they don’t even like there’s something very interesting, and probably not good, going on.
I can’t even drink the mainline American beers, they give me an instant hangover. Which is another sign of the serious lack of quality, there’s something unpleasant in a beer that gives me a headache half an hour after drinking one.