How “Far” Beer Has Come…

as with music, most fans will recognize when practitioners of a genre they may not feel connected with are great/better than the rest. they will also recognize those who are derivative at best and just...bad...at worst. sure those folks are riding a trend and selling records, but it doesn't make them good. nothing wrong with pointing that out in my eyes. if, say, you get to the John cage stage and produce silence and call it music, some ppl are gonna say that that is approaching a breaking point. I.e. they can maybe see why it had to be done once, but not over and over again. especially if ppl start to prefer silence to most of your music.

 

French toast beer as an example is quite relatable. There is one local brewery that made a name for itself for doing really playful stuff - including a French Toast beer. Despite not liking flavor additives, I actually enjoyed that release - because it allowed me to finally stop checking their tap lists and releases. There are four other breweries on that street. If one is focusing on really playful, abstract flavor additives, then I will move on to the other three. And that's if I decide to drink on that street.

Boulevard just released a new imperial stout. It has cookies or something in it. In this case, it just means I will have $15 to support a different brewery or a different release.

In short: thanks for saving me money.

 

Are you referring to Boulevard's Requiem for a Pancake?

Actually pretty good. IIRC, they re-released it under a different name, and the second release also went well.

 

Indeed. This will be my last comment here. (imagining the applause haha)

There are no lack of people in either music or beer who consider themselves cognoscenti, and there is plenty of squabbling among them in both hobbies I love for who can rightly claim the high ground, and decree the standards.

Cheers!

 

Isn't the in-house fermentation of a base wort due mostly to the Federal excise tax laws that favor malt beverages with a lower tax rate? For taste purposes, it could just be seltzer with distilled alcohol and flavorings added

 

Well, yeah that - along with some states laws/tax rates and licensing that would prohibit sales by retailers with only "beer" or "beer & wine" licenses. (That's why a lot of "wine coolers" and other such beverages with liquor brand names are really flavored malt beverages, like FIFCO/Genesee Seagram's). Plus, wouldn't licensed breweries likely need a separate distilled spirits license (?) to create and bottle flavored alcohol-added seltzers.

 

Sad but true.

 

My understanding is that this is exactly why all of the local breweries make a "malt" based seltzer. They would need an entirely different license to be adding spirits to bubbly water. Their brewery license allows them to add sugar and yeast to water, let it ferment, add fruit flavors, carbonate it, and sell it in cans or on draft.

 

Yeah, for true "malt beverages" under TTB regulations, they'd fall under TTB TD-21:

Sugar-based seltzers fall under the FDA labeling regulations since they are not legally "malt beverages" under the TTB definition but the above "may not be produced at a brewery" still applies (apparently).

Looks like the TTB just put out a presentation about it last month - Bootcamp 2021 – Hard Seltzers (September 2021) which primarily covers the malt-based seltzers.

 

I'm in the camp of beer drinkers that will always gravitate toward more "traditional" styles. I'll try just about anything once (well, except a pickle beer, but I hate pickles!). I'm actually more concerned about the proliferation of hard seltzers, because they tend to take shelf space from beer. But that's a whole other trend. What I've always wondered it, do breweries make much profit off beer like Fool's Gold? How many barrels of a beer like that can they actually sell and at what margin? Unlike the resurgence of Pale Ale in the 80's and 90's, there is a low ceiling on beers like Fool's Gold. Even if I liked it, it wouldn't replace Weihenstephaner Hefe or Schneider Weisse for me, and I'd think it safe to say for most fans of Hefe.

 

It seems the shortage is in people who are unconcerned with the likes and dislikes of others and are moreso worried about what they personally enjoy. I think you’ve somewhat illustrated this idea in some of your responses. Cheers.

 

By this logic, the "proto-geek" beer drinkers and the early "craft" brewers (Maytag, MacAuliffe, Grossman, Newman, even Koch) of the 1970-80s should have just accepted the fact that the small brewers and unique/non-AAL beers were disappearing and since the masses liked macro AAL and especially their new "Light Beers" not be so "worried about what they personally enjoy" ?

Maytag - Stick to cheese or go back to washing machines.
Grossman - Shut up and fix those bicycles.
Koch - Nobody cares about your great-great-grandfather's long defunct brewery and aren't you supposed to be at an Outward Bound event?

 

That’s not a very good analogy. Someone can make a product they think appeals to others and still enjoy whatever they like, even if it’s a completely different product . I’m sure if you could go back in time and ask those men who they were brewing for, they wouldn’t say the tastes of others because as you just stated, the taste of others was largely geared toward AAL. They were brewing the beer they wanted to drink. Once again, your rebuttal is more opinion than logic. Cheers.

edit: people online discussing dismay for the personal choices of someone else in terms of why they are consuming is completely different than someone trying to create a successful business model.

 

To expand on the point made by @jesskidden above, while I do not disagree with @cavedave 's point, it seems like there is a dichotomy in this thread with some thinking that certain beers are bad for the direction of beer and others thinking that brewers brew what sells and that's simply the way it's gonna be. Not to oversimplify or mischaracterize those positions, but there's a lot of room for nuance and complexity between those positions and not much to gain by keeping one's viewpoint firmly on one end of the spectrum.

We can look at situations of the past that mirror aspects of this conversation. Belgian brewers often talk about the rise in popularity of Coca-Cola in their region of post WWII Europe partially due to the presence of American soldiers. There's a viewpoint that this changed the taste preferences of people in the region and sweeter beverages became increasingly preferred. The narrative claims that lambic production had to change with people's tastes and sweetened versions became increasingly popular, while so-called traditional lambic beers became increasingly unpopular. Some people saw this shift as a threat to the continued existence of "traditional" lambic beer. It's entirely possible that such lambic wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for the efforts of stubborn brewers who didn't want this to disappear... combined with the audience for such efforts that came into being because of similarly passionate individuals like Michael Jackson.

Beer culture needed both sides of that equation (brewers and consumers who worked against a norm) to get to a place where we can still experience what a Cantillon beer tastes like. We shouldn't take either for granted. Even if you don't care for such beers, aren't we glad that we actually have the ability to try them? By comparison, classical music fans are in a much more comfortable spot thanks to recorded music. If all "classical music" actually disappeared as an option for consumers to listen to because it wasn't at the top of a streaming list... and turned into something only imagined and read about in textbooks, then classical music fans would be forced to be even more vocal about the qualities of that art.

None of this is to impose a judgement that certain beers, developments and tastes are "bad," but it's also not an attempt to argue for indifference in the face of consumer preferences.

 

Seltzer is likely easy to make and I'll bet quite profitable. Cha-ching goes the world, does it not?

 

Hard seltzers seems to be a perfect combination of capital, industrial brewing and (health) marketing. People believing they will stay thin, or become thin, by consuming an alcoholic product, communicated to them by way of mass marketing, backed up by industrial scale production and large amounts of capital. At the end of the day the consumer has to buy the product, and buy into the idea of healthy alcohol products, for this product category to have gotten off the ground. 50 years of light beer sales wasn't enough to convince people that low calorie alcoholic beverages wont result in an athletic physique. People are still holding out hope that they can buy their way to a healthy way of life.

I would personally lay the blame at the feet of consumers who against better judgement are throwing money at modern snake oil salesmen.

 

It's like the Coke guys years ago "saying" (imagined) in a meeting, "We really can sell this Dasani healthy water from Miami municipal supply (or wherever) for at least $1 a bottle." Industrial eureka. I still watch people rolling out of Costco with multiple cases of bottled water. Get a Brita filter for God's sake and "make" your own water.

 

when another local brewer told me how cheap it was for them to make as opposed to making beer, I finally understood why so many breweries are doing it instead of just selling, say, cans of white claw. it's insanely inexpensive and quick (and easy) to produce. a true "fast-food" version of alcohol...but marketed as healthy (as stated above).

 

On the one hand, there is that trend toward turning beer into Jamba Juice, milkshake, and pastry. Some tasty stuff, some really vulgar and stupid stuff.

On the other, there are things like what Homage, Floodland, Mills, Side Project, Hill Farmstead, Heater Allen, Suarez, Antidoot, and SARA have accomplished. Which is beautiful and moving.

 

I think this is a point worth looking at. The beer market is expanding, which means more offerings at all the margins and a wider quality spread within each style arena.

I would characterize my concern as a combination of the two poles that @zid mentioned. I am concerned that the hyper pastry/slushy trend is a danger to the beer market I value because of the risk of brewer's abandoning their role as curators and guides in favor of chasing the trends that cater to our basest tendencies.

The risk is exaggerated with those two styles specifically because there is a move within our subculture to exalt those styles as the pinnacle of the craft and deserving of the highest respect. I have tried one high end pastry stout which I was told is very much on the low end of the sweetness scale and it was near undrinkably sweet. My concern is that that trend will push nonsweet beers out of the market place. And I am left hoping that there are enough brewers brave enough to stick to their guns instead of chasing hype.