More Craft Brewers = More Mediocrity?

So many people are concerned with what kind of barrel a beer was aged in, or how many adjuncts you can fit into a beer. I, myself, was falling into this trend, where beers weren't interesting unless they had something in them I'd never had before.

I went to a brewery in SD called Bagby and they had a pretty good taplist, yet were all just brewed to style. I had an epiphany as I was sipping a pale ale (on nitro, super delicious)... I was turning into that beer hipster that is only interested in weird beers.

I think that it's all a matter of taste, some people call Black Tuesday mediocre while others call it a masterpiece.

 

I definitely would bet that style bias caused the unfortunate demise of an AAL made by a brewpub up by my father's house. It was exceptional, and about as good as the style could be made; a real pleasure to drink, too. Now it has been replaced by a good but run of the mill Pale Ale.

 

When most of the bread is past its expiration at the store and most of the bread isn't in the same league as ones that have had market presence for a long time... yeah it's time that there be fewer choices. More options can indeed adversely affect others.

 

Well yesterday I burned the rolls and my gravy did not thicken so I guess mediocrity is everywhere. A brewer is doing just the same thing. Making something. You can become proficient at anything if you care enough to really do it well. You can also have off days or mistaken ideas about how a beer might turn out. I say go ahead and have as many brewers and breweries as you can because those big guys don't like that. The maibock is not going to send people into a big line for beer but if you want to observe the enjoyment people have from it then make a good one and see them come to your pub and drink it all up.

 

No. That's not how that works. 'In the same league' implies that everyone's tastes and style preferences are the same. You and I are not in the same league. We may not even play the same sport. This shouldn't even need to be explained to an adult, yet, here we are.

As far as beer being past expiration, that's on the store and the distributors. Not the breweries. Further, and I'm sure people that have been into craft for decades can attest to this, beer still sat on shelves expired when we had half the amount of options that we do today.

People are not adversely affected by options in any other way besides "I've been here for 30 minutes and can't decide what I want."

 

This, completely and totally this.

As I slip down the craft beer rabbit hole I find that I'm more and more selective with what I enjoy and want to find. You need to decide for yourself whether your glass is half-full or half-empty. Personally, half-full. Though I don't enjoy as wide a variety of brews as I once did, I'm enjoying specific beers more than I ever have. Further, I'm enjoying the hunt! I was tickled last week to find 2 bottles of Abraxas, and took a moment to think about how that wouldn't have mattered 3 years ago. Now I get to enjoy one of them with friends, and trade one to someone on here that didn't get the chance to find one (and hear how much they enjoyed it).

 

While I understand the sentiment, I'm sick of paying for crappy homebrew on a commercial system. While breweries generally improve over time, I don't think you should open the doors with beer that is below a 6 (out of 10). The problem is the multitude of brewers who make the mistake of actually believing their buddies when they told them their homebrew was good (hint to potential brewers, none of your friends are going to tell you that your beer sucks). I know of two brewers in the Cincinnati market who have told me in so many words this is how they were inspired to open breweries. Oh, their beer sucks and I'm tired of seeing them taking up tap space that could be used for drinkable beer.

There is only a finite amount of craft beer customer dollars, so every beer spent on a new mediocre beer is a dollar less spent on a good beer which deserves customer support. You need to think bigger picture. The effect I see in sales trends is that New Brewery X is the new hotness and it sells really well for a few months...until the next new brewery either opens or enters distribution in the market. This is a relatively vicious cycle. Brewers, being the optimists they are as entrepreneurs, see people banging down their door to get every drop of beer they have and think "gee, I really have something" and start to sink significantly more time and money into expansion (both of their capacity and distribution). Only to discover in 3-6 months, they're old hat and their customers are now buying New Brewery Y beer.

 

Like most, I don't adopt some sort of absolute relativity where no beer is better or worse than other. Differences of taste do exist, but if you think the top rated beers of a style on BA are no better than the lowest rated, or that the most award winning examples at reputable competitions are no better or worse, then we should not bother to have this conversation. For those of us who think there are at least some significant differences from best to middle to lowest, then it makes perfect sense to talk about beers being in different leagues.

Having a bloated inventory can easily result in less turnover of beers that were already existing on shelves prior to expansions in inventory, thereby making it more probable that various beers will expire before purchase. That expired beer existed in the past is irrelevant to this fact. The bloated inventory can easily make the situation worse, and I've seen it firsthand.

People's actions and preferences can easily adversely affect other people's options. In this crystal clear case, I formerly had the ability to buy fresh examples of top rated beers more easily at the same store. Now there's a much larger selection, and a much higher percentage of it is expired.

Some people are adversely affected at the beer bar too where top rated examples can be taken from taps in order to make the taps just "rotating" between a variety of beers just to satisfy some people's desire to always try something new. People's choices adversely affect others' all the time. That's the way it is.

 

What is my definition of a mediocre beer? There are good and bad in every style. For example, I think Alpha King is a fantastic Pale Ale, I think Sierra Nevada is the solid average pale ale, I think there's a lot of worse pale ales that are brewed just to round out a brewery lineup. I think every brewer should seriously consider whether his beer is significantly better than what is easily available on the market:

Example:
Is your brewery's English IPA significantly better than Goose Island IPA?
Is your brewery's pale ale significantly better than Sierra Nevada Pale Ale?
Is your brewery's imperial stout significantly better than Old Rasputin?
Is your brewery's ESB significantly better than Fuller's ESB?
Is your brewery's hefeweizen significantly better than Widmer?

If your answer to any of the above is "no", sell it on draft at your brewpub and never make it again.

 

Exactly this. To think otherwise would make no sense of the shelf space debate in those other threads with AB/INBEV. There is limited shelf space at many retailers, and obviously limited tap lines at many beer bars. It is a zero sum game in many if not most instances, and obviously some customers' behaviors can and do adversely affect other people's choices.

 

Like bread, the market will determine what beers are considered good and not. If bread, or beer, doesn't sell, the companies will fail.

As far as my own personal taste goes, I cannot think of anytime in my life there have been so many great beers so easily available. Many more, many, many, many more.

It could be where you live that the opposite is true, that ten years ago the amount of great beers you could buy was huge, and now those beers have been replaced by mediocre ones, and you have fewer to choose from.

Pardon me for saying these two things but... 1. If you have fewer great beers available to you now than ten years ago you may be the only place in the U.S. that does. and, 2. If you, like the rest of the country, have many more great beers available now than there were ten years ago, (to quote a friend) what's your beef, chief?

 

But at the moment the situation is not a dichotomy with a static number of dollars and with the dollars going to either one or the other.

 

This is certainly not the case in my local/regional environment.

And those who have had market presence for a long time are among the worst of the batch and generally suffering the decline in sales the most because of it.

 

Exactly. The critical question is about the absolute numbers but about whether or not the whole curve is moving up on the scale, sliding down on the scale, or remaining static.

 

I don't see a problem. I'm still getting over 1980 when one beer from every brewery in the US would fit on one shelf in my fridge. More craft brewers means more diversity. Diversity may be good or bad. On the one hand you can look at it like the frog theory - "You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet a handsome prince." There are a lot of reasons to go to a place and buy a beer. Some places have great beer. Some have great people. Some are just great places and some are all three. There are at least 20 small craft brewers with tap rooms within a reasonable bike ride from my house. The vast majority of them will never end up taking shelf space or taps away from a quality craft beer. If I want their beer I have to go to the brewery. If their beer is good enough it may eventually make it into a store or bar.

 

The endless handwringing is worse.

 

Your point isn't an unreasonable one, but I have to disagree. At any single point in time, there are $X beer customer dollars and Y beers available on the market. So, yes it is a dichotomy, every dollar a customer spends on beer X isn't being spent on beer Y. You're right insomuch as a customer who has more variety may choose to spend more of his disposable dollars on beer, growing the amount of beer customer dollars available, but I see supply increasing significantly faster than demand.

 

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale called average. . .

Sigh.

If it weren't for this beer, we wouldn't even be having this, or just about any craft beer discussion.

Get off my lawn.