MN State Fair Beers Announced

Your complaints about beer styles says a lot more about you than the local brewing industry. The brewing industry is a for-profit situation. The breweries are making beers to sell them, to people that want to pay money for them. When the people buy them they continue making them. If you want to whine about people not liking what you like, it’s going to be lonely sitting in your basement drinking alone. A few years ago most people who were into craft beer whined about too much macro flooding the options at traditional venues like the fair. Now we should whine that breweries aren’t sending enough traditional styles? Sorry bud people vote with their dollars, and they vote against you. And the state fair is exactly the right place for experimental and oddball brews as others have said just like it is for food. I sure don’t want to make the effort to go to the fair and try al the exact same stuff I see daily everywhere else.

For the record I don’t think all the best beers are NEIPAs or flavored beers by any means. I just think people should shut up and let people drink what they want to drink and not act like they’re idiots for liking new styles of beers that have gained recent popularity. If I only drank what I started off drinking (my grandpa’s Pig’s Eye) I certainly think I would’ve missed out on many newer styles of beer over the last 25 years. Please let me know which of those I’m allowed to like though since you know best.

 

Well, on this forum, homebrewers argue with professional brewers...so I guess it depends on which absurdity you want to focus on.

 

Early 2000s: This beer is way too bitter and not malty enough. What a gimmick and completely unnatural.

 

For those who want to drink a bunch of traditional beer I would suggest Northgate Brewing. /s

 

I'm going be blunt, and call most of the beers on that list wine coolers with hops added. I feel the same about NE "IPAs". If that offends people so be it. My advice to those people is to not identify their self image so closely with what they drink.

 

BeerAdvocate is a site for beer criticism. I'm allowed to dislike any beer or type of beer, just as you're allowed to like any beer or type of beer, and this site encourages both of us to voice our opinions.

I have no problem with producers catering to consumers' demands in an effort to maximize profits, whether that demand is for bland AALs, silly gimmick beers, or well-made and sophisticated craft product. If I ran a brewery, I'd probably feature a bunch of NEIPAs, pastry stouts, and fruited kettle sours, because that's what seems to sell in 2018 (although it remains to be seen whether that will prove true in 2023). And I wouldn't be above blasting out a bunch of some stupid flavored concoction for the State Fair if I thought it would drive revenue and publicity. I do think it's a bad sign for the future (and, for that matter, the present) of the industry, both commercially and aesthetically, that what casual craft beer consumers seem to want is product designed specifically to taste like something other than beer.

While there are many more breweries in total than there used to be, on a brewery-by-brewery basis, the flavored and dumbed-down beers are partially crowding out the good stuff (be it traditional or innovative and challenging) as breweries strain to reach new customers. I'm registering my aesthetic disapproval of the result, even as I understand the business case.

 

Again, I sympathize, I just think if you take the core of your argument and apply it to brewing history we would have much less diversity. There are yeasts which "evoke fruit like flavors". Are those gimmicky? What about those crazy Belgian brewers? Where do we put the goal posts? Should we all be drinking gruit?

 

You must be young if you think that started in the 2000s....

 

And that affects my point how?

 

How about this for a fair beer:
A Special Oktoberfest beer, A brewery that would put every thing they had to show what there capable of. A rich complex not over hopped beer in the 6.5 to 7.0 ABV range

 

Go to Leinie's, Summit or Schell's. Solved!

 

Here's the thing, I like NE IPAs and pastry stouts and fruited kettle sours and all the other gimmicky beer an outspoken minority of you seem to hate so much. I also happen to like well made German and Belgian beers which pass your ridiculous litmus test of being traditional and "harder to make" etc etc. I drink beer that tastes good, regardless of what I think it says about who I am as a person.

The problem is that you are judging breweries and beer drinkers based on the beer they brew/drink relative to some scale that you think demonstrates the brewers skill. You argue that beer that is without flavor addition is better and those who appreciate it are superior to those can't appreciate it's nuanced flavor and required precision in craft. That's bullshit yo.

For every great NE IPA there are half a dozen shitty ones, same goes for fruited sours, pastry stouts, etc etc. Just like with the initial IPA trend of the past the best brewers make the best examples of the new styles, just as they did with the original styles and continue to do so today. dding fruit or other flavor additions to beer isn't always easy and in many ways these "gimmick" beers can be as hard or harder to make than certain traditional styles.

Good beer tastes good. Drink what you like and feel free to criticize beer you don't but don't begin to tell me your favorite beer is somehow better than mine because it's harder to make or because someone has been making it for however many years. That's elitist and ignorant.

 

No Not Solved, this beer will be better, bolder and different than those. Leinies did this beer, it was the big eddy beer but it was expensive.

 

Hot tip, maybe you should say things like “crowding out the styles I prefer” rather than “crowding out the good stuff” if you don’t want to sound like an elitist prick.

 

See, the thing is it's the way you state things that makes the rest of us think that you do.

 

I appreciate a very wide variety of styles and style-busting beers. I don't appreciate "wine coolers with hops added," as @KarlHungus so aptly put it, which are a regrettable recent (and hopefully fleeting) phenomenon that can obliviate any style. I'll keep calling out that garbage, popular as it may be, and you can keep apologizing for it.

 

No, not happy with Summit on a stick, I want my Special Oktoberfest beer, Swedish Egg Coffee Stout, and barbecued camel tender lion on a stick. I'm not joking.

I looked over the list of new beers again, sad lot If can so and I will say so too, I am with Islay on this one.
Pastry stouts or the like are ok in limited qualities.

 

There is far, far too much hand-wringing about gimmick beers at the MN State Fair. Last I checked, deep-fried Snickers bars have not taken over the candy shelves at Target. Cripes! Just go have a powdered-donut beer with your camel-on-a-stick and pepperoni chips, topped off with bacon ice cream.

 

People, remember, it's just beer...