Creative vs Gimmicky

There are quite wide variations in climate. that's why the Central Europeans couldn't brew in the summer and invented lagering.Even today we have regional styles though malt and hops are still the business.

 

On the small scale, yeah. But within a more general framework, no.

Again, I don't think it's as simple as we came down to those ingredients because they're necessarily best suited but a historical investigation of the potential reasons is far outside the scope of this thread. Mind you, I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying given history's tendency to be a little more complicated than ideas of monocausality I think it's unlikely.

Not to mention this is utterly tangential at this point.

 

Just a bit of a hint.

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Ghost Face Killah is a gimmick. Yet I sometimes buy it.

 

I go by taste and taste alone on beer drinking. Then price comes into the factor. IF its real beer I don't see the gimmick...
I wish you give an example of the subject your asking about.

barrel aged? its nothing new, is it gimmicky??, the price factor is painful for many.

in fact I said this many times, there is nothing new in BEER, but the labels, and the cans/bottles they are in. oh of course the marketing is damn fine gimmicks. lol

 

I try not to be a cynic so I'd like to think it's all creative. Love it or hate it, experimentation with crazy ingredients is good for craft beer.

 

How so?

 

Looking through this thread it would seem that "creative" and "gimmick" are in the eye of the beholder and that one person's "creative" is another person's "gimmick."

 

Definitely not. Some novelties wear thin very quickly, some take some getting used to. Take music as an example. An unusual key or time signature will make a song sound weird, and may make it hard to listen to at first, but in the long run will make the song shine amongst a sea of 4-4.

Bourbon barrel aged beers tasted strange to me at first - not bad, not good, just different. A few years later, I really like the taste. On the other hand, I actually enjoyed the first few sips I had of Redd's cider, but by the end of the bottle it just tasted like jolly ranchers mixed with lager. Of course, it in the eye/mouth of the beholder.

 

Can't improve much on this.

For me, the gimmicky category covers quite a lot of the craft beer movement, especially when it comes to adding non-traditional ingredients. Having different hops, malts, dry hopping, and such are easier to be in the innovative category. American IPA as an entirely new style is something innovative. At the other end are the Hibiscus Hefe-Weizens, Lapsang Souchong Doppelbocks, Civet Cat Coffee Beers, etc. It's tough to define the middle, even subjectively.

One thing that stands out is whether the underlying beer is of good quality, would be a reasonably high rated beer on its own, and if the novel ingredient is something truly enhancing to the underlying quality beer, or if the novel ingredient is defining the beer or covering up flaws or lack of good flavors underneath. If your base doppelbock deserves to be on the same shelf as Celebrator, even though probably not quite as good, then fine. But if the base doppelbock is not in the same league with the better examples out there on the shelves, then the novel, bold, whatever you call it ingredients are more likely to come across as gimmicky.

 

The full name of the beer is “La Jordana del Escorpion en Fuego Hacia la Casa del Chupacabra Muerto,” which roughly translates to “The Path of the Fiery Scorpion through the House of the Dead Chupacabra.”

The beer is a 10.1 percent ABV Mexican imperial lager brewed with agave nectar, serrano peppers and 99 real scorpions. It’s then aged on oak staves from tequila barrels.

scorpions??

 

I have a philosophy as a home brewer. Just because you can put something in a beer doesn't mean you should. I do enjoy a few odd ingredients in beer occasionally, but give me a well made to style beer with nothing else and I will buy it any day.

 

Damn they forgot the rattlesnake so I will pass.

 

I think the above quotes do a good job of capturing the difference. One thing I'd add that has not been mentioned, and I think is a crucial distinction, is:

Creative beers, I'd like to think, are born out of a brewer's desire to capture a taste, something that will be as delicious in beer form as in some other form. OR, the brewer thinks, this is an excellent ingredient, or this is an excellent mix of ingredients, and by adding them to X brew, the results will be spectacular. I truly believe a creative brewer set out to make creative brews that are good, while also new to the beer world, but not unfamiliar to consumers. Examples would be something like Elevation's Imperial Horchata Porter that tries to recreate horchata for the beer drinker (with great success), or Mexican Cake which does a great job of capturing a medley of Mexican-inspired (I say this in the loosest of terms) ingredients.

Gimmicky beers are less focused on being good. They're less focused on capturing a certain taste. They're more focused on capturing headlines, generating buzz, and on appealing to the curious consumer than the consumer with high expectations. Gimmicky beers usually have no corresponding appeal outside of the beer world, meaning that beer brewed with space rock isn't meant to capture the flavor of the delicious space rock cupcake. The beer with the most of anything or the highest of anything, the rarest of anything, the most unheard of of anything, that to me reeks of gimmick. If consumers aren't eating or drinking it already, and it's not part of a person's everyday life, and a brewer cooks it up and says it's a must have, chances are it's a gimmick.

 

I tend to agree that it usually comes down to whether it tastes good. If someone likes it - it's creative and if they don't it's gimmicky.
Along with that, for me I think it also comes down to how the flavor meld and the question of "why?" Some flavors meld well together and make for a logical pairing. Others just seem to be thrown together for the sake of making something weird. When watching the DFH show, you can actually see that they appear to brew both.

 

I'm pissed they didn't add bits of real Chupacabra.

 

You said, "If it gets worse every time, it is a gimmick."

I meant a beer getting worse every time it is par for the course on BA, not a gimmick.

See Dark Lord 2015 threads next May.

I do appreciate your thoughts though.

 

Yep, this would definitely qualify as a gimmick as it fits everything I wrote above. I'm not eating scorpions everyday and wishing they could make their way into my beer.

Another sign of a gimmick? When a bunch of non-Spanish speakers cook up the name of a beer in Spanish to capture their nutty idea, and then fail by using the wrong word. A "jordana" would be a Jordanian woman. A "jornada" would be the "journey" that they were looking for.

With so few Hispanics in the brewing world (Oh hey, New Belgium brewing) and so many Latin-inspired beers getting spit out, looks like we have a potential area for major employment of Spanish-speakers as spell-checkers and translators. Nice.

 

^ What about beers with French names?

 

Also see Hopslam, FBS, KBS, and pretty much every other seasonal release from Michigan.