Craft Beer's Looming Crisis

Pretty glad I missed those.

 

I unfortunately remember drinking a few Spanish Peaks Honey Raspberry Ales in the mid-90s.

 

Can't say I ever had many of them, so I don't know if they fit under the "very sweet fruit infused" category, but there were a number of fruit-flavored "craft" beers in the mid-90s. Just flipping though a 1997 book, The Beer Essentials (Pacult), I find:

Blue Moon Raspberry Cream Ale
Buffalo Bill's Pumpkin Ale
Celis Raspberry*
Magic Hat #9
Nor'western Raspberry Weizen
Georgia Peach
Oregon Raspberry Wheat
Pete's Strawberry Blonde*
Rhino Chasers Peach Honey Wheat
Rogue 'n Berry Ale
Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat
Samuel Adams Cranberry Lambic*
Saxer Lemon Lager
Spanish Peaks Peaches and Cream Ale
Spanish Peaks Raspberry Ale

* not in book, but available around that time.​

 

OK, if I may. I think the author feels that fruit beers at some point have a diminishing effect upon beer as a whole. There can be nothing wrong with fruit beers, but the bizarre profusion of them is perplexing to many. They do remind me of "wine coolers". Cascade Blueberry looms large in my beer experience memory. Cheers.

 

Not sure but people here often talk about the problem being low quality craft beer. Looking at my ratings pretty much the only craft beers that rival macros for low quality are fruit beers.

 

Perhaps there will be a market correction. The way the author seems to angle on and on about it though. I don't necessarily believe so. I definitely understand there being a finite amount of shelf space as well as attention span which will create a sustainability bubble. A too many things, and too few people sort of problem. To compare now to 1996 is slowpoke imagination though. People have learned a few things about business from the mistakes of the past.

 

This is the type of reasoning I was looking for. Thank you. Though for me it still doesn't explain the correlation (I admittedly can be a bit thick at times).

I still am not sure why the bolded would be the case. If that is the point he is trying to make, then he didn't ever really make it, nor did he provide any supporting evidence or analysis. What is it specifically about fruit beers that would have this effect? As opposed to some other styles that seem to become extremely popular for a time and then fade. Is he just using fruit beers as one example? And I don't think the profusion of fruit beers is bizarre at all. I think they appeal to a broader customer base. Folks that like beer enjoy them (not all folks of course, as a few of you have pointed out ), but folks that don't typically like beer also enjoy them. Similar to why the hazy/turbid/bitter-less IPAs are becoming so popular --- they are very easy to drink for those that typically aren't huge beer drinkers (hopefully nobody takes offense to that comparison ... I enjoy some of these beers myself)

It seems to me that the author is attempting to correlate the profusion of fruit beers with market saturation, but it all just seemed to not really jive for me and detracted from his point.

Again, really appreciate the response. Cheers!

 

& they own a sizeable % of the new parent company. It's not a complete sell-off, similar to Goose Island, Ballast Point, etc. That deal may be about distribution clout as much as anything else.

 

Lew posts here occasionally as @therealbeerfly , and may be happy to get deeper into the piece with you if he does, but I'd suspect that one answer will be how he had a limited word count to work with, and this is how the Daily Beast editor saw fit to whittle things down. It's happened before as Garrett Oliver (and probably others) has come on here to engage in further discussion when an OpEd has been published.

 

Back in the 1870s, when there were about as many breweries as now, the US population was a fraction of what it is now. (10-12%).
Of course it probably takes more to sustain a brewery now, and better transportation & communication has allowed some to grow proportionally larger than the increase in population. Those factors though, also increase the possibilities for export too. I take the doom prophets with a few grains of salt.

Fruit beers? Take a look around your local bottle shop, & grocery store shelves. Not just at the part you're interested in. There is a lot of shelf space, & a lot of cases of fruity ......things... of both malt liquor & "cider" . If some of those customers can be transferred over to the fruity beers, then those brewers have a better chance to continue on. How to do that? - ?????

 

Any large to midsized brewer that has recently or is currently invested heavily into a big expansding, I'd be concerned with.

I was there in '95 and Sam Adams Cherry Wheat and Pete's Strawberry Blonde were probably the 2 most liked craft beers by the majority of people at that time. Of course the very few hardcore beer geeks turned up their noses to these but they were definitely the face of craft at that time.

 

That is a very good point. Those of us that aren't writers sometimes forget about these details.

 

Never heard of any of them but *9 which IMO only had a hint of fruit but I stand corrected.

 

Durian... the next flavor trend. Durian Sculpin, anyone?

 

I guess I missed them due to I stopped drinking beer around that time for a buncha years One good thing about stopping, I guess.

 

Not to mention that French one with the gray plastic cap thingy.

EDIT -- name was 36:15 Pêcheur...just remembered. Had mango in it.

 

No they weren't. And I'm glad you pointed it out. What was going on in the mid-1990s wasn't even the sixth-grade C team compared to the varsity squad on the field right now.

We've lost a couple of craft breweries in Texas over the past year or two. But the ones that are sticking are becoming entrenched in the state's beer-drinking DNA. I'll keep sipping my fresh Hop Delusion and let Chicken Little keep squawking about the sky falling ... it's partially entertaining at least.

 

Today, I finally convinced the manager of my favorite liquor store to let me break up any craft 6 pack (SN Oktoberfest) and sell me 2 singles. This is big guys. Craft, FTW! Rally!!

 

Thomas Kemper Berry Weizen and Pyramid Apricot Ale would fit in here too. I can only remember TK's specifically, but I think there were at least 2 or 3 other raspberry wheat beers in the NW around the same time.

 

Writers always need a crisis to write about . . . real or imagined! Let's just enjoy the beer we enjoy. Where there is a market, someone will fill it.