Controversial Beer Opinions Thread

And I of course am colored by my love of all beer styles, and my belief that catering to popular opinions keeps breweries thriving, and can't help but provide me beer I love. That is, unless there is an industry wide decrease in skill, but I see just the opposite.

Have to travel some to get it, but Hop Craic still makes it here, I believe, and there are for sure downright bitter IPA still sold and enjoyed. I like the real palate scrapers on a hot day in summer.

Anymore, I just go from one style I love to another, there is so much goodness from so many great brewers. How can anyone complain? Our craft beer situation is we're living in the best place at the best time to enjoy fine beer in the history of the world

 

Perhaps for some things. For evaluating the moreish-ness a beer does or doesn't have when drank (which is very important), I would think it has its limitations.

@jesskidden

 

While breweries may be trying to make beers that look and taste like what's popular, I've never heard anybody say "well it tastes like shit, but boy is it hazy that's a 5/5!"

I just don't get the idea that people are going out of their way and spending (lots of) money to drink beer they don't actually like. Maybe I'm misconstruing the complaints about the fad-iness of NEIPA, but at the end of the day as long as people are drinking what they want to drink, I'm just not really sure where the complaints come from, outside of a knee-jerk reaction to an admittedly overbearing social media representation.

 

M43 is the best NEIPA on the market, prove me wrong?

 

Where the complaints come from (a few examples):

1. NEIPAs are, at least to some extent, crowding other beers, especially other IPAs, out of the market. In many markets, it's much harder than it used to be to find new non-New-England IPAs (or at least IPAs not heavily influenced by NEIPAs). Thus, the popularity of NEIPAs is reducing the quality options for people who don't enjoy the substyle. In my market, I believe non-NEIPA availability at bottle shops, bars, and breweries peaked in 2017 and has been on the wane ever since.
2. The overwhelming popularity and cool factor of NEIPAs have distorted the conversation about craft beer. I have been informed multiple times that I'm an idiot for failing to include certain breweries known primarily for their NEIPAs in my recommendations and best-of lists. It's difficult for me to get meaningful local recommendations when I travel because so many responders or would-be responders focus on the local NEIPA specialists.
3. The outsized ratings for NEIPAs here and on Untappd are steering new craft beer drinkers toward NEIPAs and discouraging them from exploring craft beer further because they think they are already drinking some of the best beers that mankind ever has been able to produce. Consequently, potential drinkers of other styles may be permanently lost into NEIPA purgatory, and the absence of demand for those styles will result in lower availability.
4. NEIPAs are absorbing the lion's share of breweries' R&D and experimentation efforts. Many breweries are failing to develop interesting new beers at the rate that they once did because they are concentrating their resources on making ever "hazier," ever "juicier" NEIPAs.
5. The mainstreaming of NEIPAs is changing craft beer drinkers' palates, causing them to demand sweeter and less bitter beers in a variety of other styles (hence the slightly trailing trends of pastry stouts and heavily fruited but lightly tart kettle sours). Thus, even outside of NEIPAs, consumers who favor dryness and bitterness are experiencing setbacks as the sorts of beers they favor are tweaked or retired to suit changed consumer tastes.
6. To the extent that the craft beer market exhibits bubble-like features, those features are heavily concentrated in the NEIPA space. Since trendiness is such a big component of NEIPAs' appeal, breweries that have opened and expanded largely to serve the NEIPA market may be in grave danger when NEIPAs inevitably lose their perception of hipness. And because many (not all) NEIPA fans never have fully developed a taste for flavors traditionally associated with craft beer (preferring familiar juice-like flavors), there's a good chance that many of them will cease being craft beer customers almost entirely (perhaps switching to the likes of malternatives, alcopops, sweet ciders, and sugary cocktails). The problem isn't that those who consume NEIPAs don't enjoy the taste of NEIPAs; it's that all too many of them don't enjoy the taste of other beers besides NEIPAs, coupled with the fact that there are more efficient (but presently less trendy) beverage vehicles for them to satisfy their flavor preferences. Thus, overreliance on a fickle customer base that currently seeks NEIPAs could produce a cascade effect that harms much of the industry, if the industry is forced to downsize after losing a large swath of currently (but likely not permanently) NEIPA-obsessed customers. I've spoken to multiple professional brewers who are very concerned about this possibility.

 

Did I say that?

 

That is the difference between anger and reason. I think maybe it's viral, like something really odd got loose in our cultural flux. These are strange times where name-calling is dangerously close to becoming normal. You tell me what the antidote is?

 

While I think your 1. and 2. statements are absolutely correct, I think statements 3. through 6. are just intellectual hypotheses that may or may not actually have any supporting evidence. i.e. I don't really think there's any evidence to support the statement that people whose gateway to good beer has been NEIPAs don't branch out to other beer styles.

 

I think there's quite a bit of evidence of that phenomenon, most of it indirect. What proportion of people who come to this site or Untappd as NEIPA enthusiasts shirk their interest in NEIPAs and move on to equal or greater enthusiasm about other styles (besides the likes of pastry stouts and fruited kettle sours)? I'd be shocked if it isn't a massively lower proportion than that of initial fans of classic gateway beers like blonde ales, amber ales, brown ales, Helles lagers, etc. that, unlike NEIPAs, very much rely on flavors traditionally associated with beer, just at muted levels compared to those in many other styles.

Heck, many NEIPA fans, including among the many who are new to craft beer, don't even think of NEIPAs as gateway beers but rather as the pinnacle of brewing prowess. Why downgrade from the best? I've encountered that attitude numerous times in these forums and in the real world from consumers who have been interested in (a small pocket of) craft beer for only a few years or less but who, with a sense of unassailable superiority, are convinced that they are on the vanguard and that anyone who thinks differently is at best an old man yelling at a cloud. Listen to this podcast for an amusing yet frustrating example (hey, anecdotal evidence still is evidence). That said, it would greatly help in the encouragement of people to branch out if craft beer critics and connoisseurs (I know some people find that term pretentious) were more vocal in letting newer craft beer drinkers know that many of us find most examples of the NEIPA substyle, including many that are very highly rated, to be poorly brewed (often under-attenuated by historical standards), one-dimensional, cloying, and, frankly, silly. If people really want to appreciate beer for beer (and not beer for juice), they can, and should, do better, or at least broader. To me, that's what beer advocacy is all about.

Also, if you haven't picked up on the Great Sweetening that is happening throughout the craft beer world, with increased levels of residual sugars, reductions in distracting bitterness, hops designed to emulate sweetness by tasting as "juicy" as possible, and the additions of lactose and flavoring adjuncts late in the brewing process that leave behind sucrose and fructose (i.e., other beers shifting toward the tastes of NEIPA enthusiasts because NEIPA enthusiasts generally aren't otherwise shifting toward the tastes of other beers), you're not paying attention.

We're never going to get peer-reviewed scientific studies of these phenomena, and ordinary consumers aren't ever going to see pragmatic industry marketing analysis. That doesn't mean these things aren't happening or that we should throw our hands up in hopeless ignorance.

 

You and I have already had this exact conversation in the past, at least once. We’re in agreement that most milkshake IPAs are antithetical, and that many pastry stouts are muddled, cloying messes.

Of course I have noticed the beer landscape change over the last couple years, and I certainly don’t love everything I try, but I’ve been drinking good beer long enough to be able to appreciate change, and to not complain when I’m living in a golden age of choices. I love NEIPAs and pastry stouts and guess what? I love hefes, dunkels, kolsches, and pilsners as well.

I just don’t agree with you that there is some kind of alarming disconnect between enjoying classic styles and enjoying these current flavors of the week. If we start to creep up on the point of having trouble finding a good selection of classic styles then I may start singing a different tune, but we certainly aren’t there yet, at least not in my neck of the woods.

 

I actually started a thread about it, and posted a list of 30+ styles I can get easily and made well. Could have added another ten that were available but not as easy to get. Forget about the fact that some of the currently and easily available styles on that list were barely available in this country, or not available at all, and some not yet invented, in this imaginary past era of huge numbers of styles' abundantly and easily available on store shelves across the country that now are gone forever, displaced by NEIPA. Forget about the fact that the brewery chosen best in my state doesn't make NEIPA, or any IPA for that matter, nor any sweet stouts. Forget about the fact that here and in most parts of the country only ten years ago the list of locally available styles on that list would have been half as large, or smaller, with less than a sixth the number of American breweries in existence as there are now, and much lower amounts of distro for those.

So, when/where was this mythical time/place of abundance of styles? So far it exists only in the minds of a few, but maybe someone will at last flesh out the delusion and prove it real? Sure wasn't anywhere near to here, not five, ten, fifteen, twenty, or twenty five years ago. Not at any time during my fifty years of beer drinking. But I guess reality shouldn't get in the way of a good story.

 

More beer?

 

It's certainly worth a try!

Cheers!

 

I notice you have a tendency to ask leading questions but ignore the responses when they differ from your predetermined conclusions. I suppose that's consistent with your motto that "reality shouldn't get in the way of a good story."

The answer to this particular question varies considerably market-to-marker. As I wrote yesterday in this thread, in the Twin Cities area, which as of this writing has over 120 breweries and what most would consider a vibrant craft beer scene, I estimate the peak of practical style availability and non-NEIPA beer variety to have been in 2017, with a steady though not necessarily steep decline since then. This applies to bottle shops, bars, and taprooms.

The decline has been extraordinarily steep, however, within the IPA style, which happens to be my favorite style (excluding NEIPAs) and the favorite style of the plurality of craft beer drinkers. I do believe that non-NEIPA selection is better today than it was five years ago in general, but I wouldn't be surprised if even at some point more than a decade ago more and better options were available within the IPA style, not in terms of locally brewed options (of which there were far fewer) but in terms of the quantity and quality of IPAs available at better bottle shops and beer-oriented bars.

It's remarkable that, in this era of substantial brewery growth, we would have seen a peak at all, and that's a testament to the corrosive power of the market dominance of NEIPAs and, to a lesser extent, the other sweet hip styles.

 

"I estimate..."

You know, in the absence of real actual data there is no way to tell whether or not you are subject to a confirmation bias, i.e., looking only at what fits your beliefs. Also, since you admit things may vary from market to market there's no real substative basis presented for believing that if your market has gone the way you claim that that is in any way representative of the market place in general.

 

Tell that to @cavedave and @beersgud. I've noticed that you (along with a few prominent others around here) tend to demand data mainly when you're skeptical of a claim and seem not to hesitate to "like" posts with non-data-based claims if they're consistent with your own estimations. You're far from immune from confirmation bias.

 

So they are concerned but selling a boatload of them, that is the point of being in business. Selling to the consumer that wants your product over another one. There is also plenty of alternatives out there and NEIPA's are just a trend, a great trend mind you for a hot summer day! IPAs will never go out of style, they have evolved like many other styles. I love trying new brews all across the board, this being as trendy as it is is one that has caught fire because of how accessible it is. This is a great gateway IPA for people who want something sweeter, you are missing the point that this could lead consumer's taste buds all over the board. Much like light beer this is the accessible portion of the IPA world, this still doesn't prove me wrong how awesome M43 is, a good brew is a good brew, bottom line.

 

Interesting response.

 

The sun has always gone over the yardarm somewhere.

 

A lot of those pics are lies.