Biggest beer pet peeves

No incentive for them. People still go and order a $100 bottle of wine and don't even look at or complain about the [lack of] beer. While we think craft beer is a huge thing on BA, for a lot of folks you go to the bar after work and drink BMC then go out once a week and drink wine with dinner. I agree it would be nice and any experienced beer drinker can recommend craft to go with their meal, but it would be a lifestyle change for the restaurants and it's patrons. Maybe with time we will see it...

 

Happy hour specials advertised as "all domestic drafts" for $3 or $4 . . . then somehow it turns out that Delaware is apparently a foreign country because Dogfish Head isn't domestic; in fact the only beers that cheap are Bud Light, Coors Light or Miller Light.

 

I saw Sierra Nevada Summer Ale in stores when there was still snow on the ground. And I live in VIRGINIA.

 

I'm sure this will vary region by region, but at this point in time, if a "high end" restaurant in NYC only offered BMC/Stella/Blue Moon for their beer selection, then it would make me question whether the food was any good, or if the restaurant really was high end at all.

 

Bingo. I've been burned many times on purchasing old IPAs. Nothing is worse than taking that first sip of something that you shelled out $10-$20 for and realizing that it tastes about three months old. I no longer buy any pale beer that isn't bottle dated.

 

Pumpkin Ales hitting shelves in late July. I understand the business rationale behind it, but I just don't like it.

 

It's when a newer brewery thinks every style it makes needs to be a hop bomb.

 

Distributors sitting on their supply of the summer seasonal until the supply of winter seasonal barleywine is finally sold out. In June. In Florida.

 

Artificially created exclusivity. If you can only brew so much of a beer, I get it. But when you're a big boy and tickets to your release event sell out in 2 minutes, brew twice as much and sell out in 4 minutes. Or have 2 events. You'll still be exclusive, with twice as many happy customers.

 

As I was reading through I thought I was going to be first to say this... Drats. It's especially true for 12oz bottles. I just can't bring myself to do it. I can suck it up for some 16oz 4 packs, like Molotov Lite.

 

Overnight experts, especially if they are somebody I know. We've all met or known these people, the guy who six months ago only drank Bud Light (nothing wrong with that IMHO) but now says things like "hallertau hops are so 4 years ago." I guess this is to be expected, what with craft beer being the "cool" thing to do these days...

 

Beers with names that I either can't pronounce or can't get through in one breath. If I'm at a bar and a beer description sounds good but the name is so hard to pronounce that I feel like I'll look like a newb, I'll probably go with my second choice. The same can be if a beer has a sentence for a name, it's just unnecessary and sounds amateurish in my opinion.

I also can't stand bottles that either have the name of the beer in some small font on the side of the bottle or in some obscure font that becomes hidden in the artwork.

Last one...I can't stand when a brewery makes a beer and then makes 10 variations of the same beer. Like taking an IPA and dry hopping it 5 different ways or adding lemons, grapefruit or something else. I get barrel aging because you aren't really adding any other ingredients, you're just getting the flavors of the barrel, but when you start dry hopping, adding coffee, vanilla, and any fruits to your beer, it's no longer the same beer in my opinion.

 

This is the worst. I get it if it's a Sour or BA Stout or something. There are only so many barrels to go around and only so much space in a brewery to age those hundreds of barrels for a year or however long.

When it's just an IPA that kicks ass, why not just brew the shit out of it? I'm not saying they need to expand their facilities to make enough for the whole country but why are you making some average IPA year round and only releasing the stuff that people want once or twice a year? Don't give me the "rarity makes it special" crap. Heady Topper and Pliny the Elder are brewed year round and they're ranked #1 and #3 on here for IIPAs. For example, Neshaminy Creek puts out The Shape of Hops to Come once a year and it barely touches the shelves even in PA, but then the rest of the year they have Blitzkrieg of Hops and that kind of stuff that just sits on shelves. It's not a bad beer, but damn, it's no Shape of Hops.

I know some breweries, especially smaller ones don't have year round "shelf beers" like Trillium and Tree House for example, they seem to just release whatever is ready, and that's fine. What bothers me is when a brewery puts out an inferior product for 11 months out of the year just so they can have the craze of their good stuff that will just get hoarded anyway.

 

Seriously, my #1 peeve! Why sell Mo and Peeper when few want those and they just sit on the shelves, but then have people wait in line hours for a chance at a lottery ticket.

 

I thought shelf referred to six pack beer available in stores. Have I been wrong all the long?

 

Yes, normally that's what it refers to, but a lot of people refer to Hill Farmstead's more readily available saisons (at the brewery) as shelf saisons. Kind of a bastardization of the term

 

A lot of the well-regarded IPAs have incredibly expensive and hard to acquire hops, so the breweries can't actually make more of them than what they already do. So many breweries want the big well regarded hops- Citra, Simcoe, Mosaic, Galaxy, etc, etc- but there's only a finite amount of them.

 

people who suggest beginner [insert style] beers as if beer requires a tempered palate.

 

ok. yeah, that is taking a liberty

 

I was in my local supermarket last year when the SN rep was pulling Summerfest off the shelves... the first week of August.