Classic craft beer?

I love a Dale's Pale Ale day in and day out. Just a solid beer. Nothing fancy

 

Finding my way back to the classic WCIPAs more and more these days . . . beer that tastes like beer.

 

I'm also heading more towards classic styles of ipas. I don't mind a beer being a little juicy, but I've about had my fill of carbonated pineapple juice. M-43 is wildly popular, but I just don't enjoy it like a crisper beer. Also finding out that I don't like weirdly flavored stouts much. Bought a 4 pack of blueberry maple stout and started wishing I didn't half way through the first beer. Curiousity has been killing my wallet/good beer selection... time to go back to my roots.

 

All of the above, and then some. Variety is what it's all about!

 

I will try anything that looks interesting but my interest doesn't fall in the highly flavored fads.

 

Yeah, even when they're good they tend to overstay their welcome pretty quickly. Just the nature of the beast, imo

 

I just want to emphasize that what these three trendy styles have in common is that they seek to bury or hide beer-specific flavors and instead emphasize familiar, accessible flavors from outside of beer. I've made this point previously on these boards, and it rubs some people the wrong way (in part, I suspect, because it hits a little too close to home in many cases), but I'm convinced that these styles have surged in popularity due to the recent, massive influx of young drinkers into the hobby as craft beer has gone mainstream and become cool. Many of these newcomers are people who, although they may not realize it and rarely will admit it, enjoy the scene more than beer itself, and they prefer to drink beverages that are sweet and familiar and taste like something other than beer (juice, dessert, etc.). As a veteran fan of craft beer, I neither need nor want the flavors that are unique to beer to be hidden or overwhelmed, regardless of how much I enjoy the other flavors that are being superimposed.

 

Yeah, sweetness is good here and there. But not a steady diet of it. I have a lagunitas lucky 13 (red ale) I'm gonna drink tonight. Strangely excited about that one

 

I tried a bunch of NEIPA's. They seem like fruit punch beer. There ok but one 12 oz pour is enough. They taste good at first but get sickening fast. They are ok for variety but for session drinking I will stick to old style clear IPA's.

I enjoy Peanut Butter beers etc, but not something I want all the time, one and done again for the day. I will take bock or Black lager or non pastry stouts for session drinking.

 

status update: beer remains good. some new beers are bad. watch out.
Lately I've been all about Fall River Hexagenia, 16 oz cans for ~3$ and it's such a nice crispy ipa. Also just tried Moonlight Death and Taxes, they call it a dark lager, and it was so nice and roasty yet crisp. Light enough to drink to many of but substantial enough that it was pleasant to sip on for 30 or 40 minutes. Beer remains good.

 

Drinking some jack Abby craft lagers and I can't get enough at 5 abv.. Not sure if you consider it a classic but they're some really tasty lagers that drink like meals

 

Yes. All the time. I have been know to drink a SNPA or two.
Sadly, I have to go out of my way sometimes to find German lagers and English ales as they couldn't get arrested if they tried.

 

I've been buying less and less neipa, they started blending in for me and the price isn't great. I still buy them but not as much. Been buying a lot more wc ipa lately. I've alway's preferred wc ipa over neipa but I got swept up in the haze craze last year.

 

I like beer.

 

I don't mind "pastry" beers, though am usually disappointed. I know what to expect from Belgian Quads/Tripels, Stouts, Porters, Hefeweizens, Kölschs, and many other classic styles with no add-junk. BBA and RBA are preferred.

 

Guess I'll just have to drink a few more of these to make sure I don't like 'em.

 

I have no issue purchasing and drinking the new and the old styles. It's all beer.

 

Not to pick on you (and I totally get your sentiment) but what exactly does beer taste like? Go back a few years and the “old guard” then were bemoaning the fact that rip-your-face off WCIPAs were one dimensional, one trick ponies that were pushing out “real” IPAs - beers that had more balance. But then the geriatric guard would chime in and say even those beers were too extreme compared to their English predecessors - a true IPA was actually a subtle cask-dispensed thing of 3.8% ABV balanced beauty. And it would be then that Ron Pattinson would chime in to tell everyone that actually, in 1783, Reginald Squigglebottom of Sheepshit-upon-Thames in England, brewed a highly hopped barrel aged 11% ABV monster.

In a perfect (and completely unrealistic) world for me, new variations would pop up, be appreciated, and sit alongside all of the prior iterations of the style, and everyone would appreciate all of them. Imagine rocking up to a brewery and seeing 6-7 very different IPAs (alongside lots of other styles of course). Of course in practice breweries have beers to sell, tastes change, and beer geeks want the latest and greatest.

 

I'm a classics fan. Spaten Premium Lager or Pilsner Urquell is almost always in my fridge, depending on which is freshest. If I see any fresh Fuller's beer I buy it. There is usually a good chance of finding a Bell's classic, especially Two Hearted, or SN PA in my fridge. During the summer, SN Summerfest is always in stock.

The older I get the more I appreciate classic English and German styles. There is a beauty to their balance that more modern beer styles lack. I still occasionally buy other beers, especially bourbon barrel aged barleywines in the winter. But those beer to me are a rare treat and are probably less than 1% of my beer consumption.