Category: Beer Smack

BeerAdvocate has hosted over 50 festivals since 2003. We also take pride in the fact that our fests offer attendees a chance to meet their favorite brewers and fellow beer advocates.

If you don’t like a beer, don’t drink it. Life is too short and good beer is too plentiful. But do you really need to brag about your drainpour like a cretin?

An intervention letter from forgotten beer styles, imploring hop-addicted beer drinkers to change their ways.

Looking back on the industry in 2015, we’ve learned that no one cares if a brewery sells out, and now everything is “craft.”

This Brewers Association predicted that the US will soon exceed the record of 4,131 breweries set in 1873. That’s a big number. And it’s sparked the whole “When will the beer bubble burst?” debate again. But let’s not forget: 1873 and 2015 are different times.

As it applies to reviewing beer, far too many people lack the attention span to read or write anything longer than a tweet. They react to clickbait headlines without reading, would rather tick beers and move on, and take as fact any information that’s delivered to them immediately in blurb or list format.

It’s our collective responsibility to create a better beer culture by challenging ourselves, having those hard discussions about our community, naming names and remaining open to constructive criticism.

Brewers need to pay more attention to reviews and the long-term quality of their beers as they flow through the marketplace—the two are unarguably connected.

We’d love to see more bars move to the British nonic pint, a 20-ounce container that leaves plenty of room for some proper head. Not only do they look cool, they’re inexpensive, versatile and nobody hates them yet.

It’s Friday night. You order a beer at a bar, use an app to tick it on your list, snap a pic, broadcast it on social media, and then refresh to see how many people liked it. What happened to just ordering a beer and enjoying it with the people around you?

Since we announced the launch of BeerAdvocate magazine in June 2006, we’ve been told that “print is dead” and that it was likely to fail. Admittedly, the mag has been hit with some challenges over the years, but we met them head on, learned from them, and 100 issues later, we’re still here.

When we launched BeerAdvocate magazine back in January 2007, we were tired of the growing amount of fluff journalism and ass-kissing in the beer industry. Where was the critical thinking and brutal honesty, the constructive criticism and irreverent poking?

We challenge brewers to stop following this hoppy trend. Become a leader instead. Show us that there’s more to beer than paint-by-number IPAs.

2014 was a big year for BeerAdvocate magazine. All numbers were up across the board and more people are reading the mag than ever before. So a big thanks goes out to all of our supporters and subscribers. As for the future, we’ve set our sights even higher.

At the end of the day, the real judges are consumers. And they don’t care if a beer meets specific style guidelines or wins a medal. They just care if the beer is good.

Consolidation is a natural byproduct of a maturing industry. It’s an inevitable part of the life cycle in nearly every field of business. You don’t have to like it, but you’d better get used to it.

Pay to play is basically the act of bribing a bar to put your beer on tap. Once thought to be solely a macro brewer tactic, all sizes of brewers and distributors now use it to bump competition and gain valuable exposure at bars, restaurants and other retail outlets. Yes, even your small, local, independent brewer.

Presentation is part of the experience of enjoying beer and an influencer for consumers. It’s the eye candy that teases the other senses and sets expectations. It’s the all-important first impression. So why are a growing number of brewers releasing beers that frankly look like shit?

We’ll cut to the chase. Three terms need to be purged from the beer vernacular. Once meaningful, they’ve become misused, overused and abused.

A listicle is basically a ranked, themed, or in some cases random list with words wrapped around it that’s passed off as content. We’re not fans. And here’s why they suck, in no particular order.

Though not a new concept, “session beer” is one of the more recent beer trends in the US. It’s a sound concept, and has its place. But here in the US, it’s a flawed practice.

This is a bittersweet issue for us here at BeerAdvocate. Courtney Cox is about to pass the red pen to a new managing editor. During her tenure, she’s taken a magazine that many thought would fail before it started to one of the most respected beer magazines in the world.

Given craft beer’s fast growth, we could certainly see it reaching 20 percent of the US beer market volume by 2020. However, the support for such volume is a whole other story. In order to reach 20 percent, and maintain it, craft brewers need to start focusing, now.

We’re seeing a disturbing, growing trend in the craft beer scene: homebrewers operating like licensed brewers.