What's your take on beer collaborations?

I voted middle of the road. I've never considered a collaboration as a good reason to buy a beer, although I'll buy one if it involves a favorite brewery. But I try to buy everything new from a favorite brewery anyway.

However, I did go out of my way to try 3-4 different examples on tap of the Sierra Nevada Resilience beer, although that one was kind of a hybrid collaboration.

 

I rarely even pay attention to them and never buy any these days because I can only think of 2-3 that I would buy again. Most would fall into the very average to poor category for me. Some of them are very surprising considering the track record/experience of the breweries involved.

 

The Oktoberfests have been excellent. They are really the only ones outside of this Trillium one that I can recall that were above average.
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/3521/234817/

 

Middle of the road here as well. I have found that most are good, some scant few have been excellent, some scant few have been unholy spawns of satan. Hmm...sort of a normal distribution, I suppose.

I think the idea is greater than the results, in general. I'll get excited to see a couple of top brewers putting their skills together and hope it creates something very special, which it usually doesn't - good most of the time with outliers as I said.

One thing I think would be very tough - a collaborative brew may lack the cohesive vision a brewer would realize when creating their own, individual products. Collaboration would imply that ego and individual creative vision need to be temporarily suspended, otherwise why collaborate? Just to create a "stir" and temporary buzz of publicity?

 

I've had a very good experience with them overall. The SN Oktoberfest collabs have been excellent, and one of our local breweries (SingleSpeed) has done some great stuff in collaboration with Backpocket and Pulpit Rock. Then there's Surly's Todd and Blakkr. I'm looking forward to the DFH-Rodenbach creation, whatever it turns out to be.

 

I had to mark excellent - aside from the SN Oktoberfest one, Alvarado Street has put out a bunch of great collab. beers in the past year with Great Notion, Other Half, Moonraker, Moksa, Saint Adairius...

A lot of local breweries around here put out rotating collabs.; can't say I really recall having a bad or totally disappointing one.

 

It really, really depends. It has been long said that collaborations are just an excuse to get drunk at another brewery. Obviously there are exceptions, but I don't think most actually involve a whole lot of collaboration beyond the initial idea.

 

Fort George's (Astoria, OR) annual 3 Way IPA collaborations with rotating breweries have been some of the best beers I've had. They set a high bar for comparison.

 

Hate collabs most of the time, aside from say the SN collab each year. That is a collab done right, to offer a product to consumers that is special. There are other good ones of course, but often not.

The NE hype brewery collabs are a joke. Brew the same crap, say it's a collab and watch it sell like hotcakes. Esp if you get the hypiest of the hyped together!

To me, collabs ideally should bring two breweries together that don't do the same stuff, and brew a beer that is unique for both. One in which both parties learn something new and something hopefully amazing is born.

 

The few I. Bought were poor to bad. A few years back at gabf, I waited in line for a Avery colaberation with another Brewer. Again not so good so, I don't seek them out at all.

 

Collaborations really range for me. Most of the time when its two different breweries that are coming together to create a new beer I really enjoy it. If you research the beers they typically make you can almost pick out the strengths from each brewery in the beer. However on the flip side I feel that whenever two "hyped" breweries come together to make a beer a lot of the time it seems gimmicky. For example two breweries that are known for NE IPA coming together to brew another NE IPA.

When its two breweries working together to teach each other something and create I would buy the collaboration every time. The gimmicky beers are starting to get old.

Cheers!

 

Exactly

 

Sounds like Sierra Nevada/Weihenstephaner Braupakt.

 

I often wonder if brewers hold back during collaboration beers to not reveal each other’s secrets to each other.

 

They're a gimmick.

 

Poor. I feel like they create unnecessary hype and the beer is on par with core offerings if you're lucky. Never & Again and Fireplace Bananas come to mind.

 

So this might be a real newb question here but how exactly do beer collaborations work? I've done a little homebrewing but just enough to follow some recipes. So do the brewers get together and like both bring a recipe and then try to combine them? Does one propose a recipe and the other is like 'o cool but if we have 3% flaked oats and bring the spurge temperature up we'll get a way fuller body'? It's never really made any sense to me other than just the fact that it's probably super fun to go to your buddy's place on the other side of the country/world and make some beer together thing.

My experience has been pretty meh, I liked the beer camp thing and wish SN would bring it back, but that was also just a wild style mix and it was cool to try some beers 'from' brewers not in my normal distribution. The last collab I tried was Burial and J. Wakefield and it very much underwhelmed, extra confused about the JWB hype after drinking it

 

The first collaboration experience for me was about 3 or 4 years ago. Trillium and other half were releasing street green or green streets. They did one in Boston and the same recipe in Brooklyn. The hype and line was crazy in Brooklyn. I was there at 6:30 am and I was about 250 in line. It was exciting and it was fun. The beer was really good. Honestly it's been all downhill since then. Still long lines at Other Half or some of the others in NYC metro area and the beer has always been ok but not as good as the independent brewery offerings. I figure if I have a gem of intellectual property why share it. In any case I stay away from waiting on line for collabs. Not worth my time. Cheers

 

Collaborations have nothing to do with the actual beer but more to do with generating demand/hype. In my experience, the collaborations offer nothing that the individual breweries couldn't produce on their own but when they can slap the name of a hyped out-of-distribution brewery on the packaging it will generate some interest.

How much involvement does a brewery need to have in the brewing process for the beer to be considered a collaboration? I imagine in some instances, the brewers get together and come up with a recipe and brew the beer together while other times the collaborating breweries never actually do anything but talk to one another.

A local brewery did a collaboration with 8 other breweries on 1 beer, I can't imagine there was too much involvement with these other breweries.

 

Most are meh. A handful are really good and a few are awful but most fall somewhere in the middle of the road. They might be interesting but generally not worth standing in line or going out of your way for.