End of 2nd wave?

I was only drinking breast milk back then so I can't attest but if you mean by bad craft, that the breweries are putting out sub par product per style, exploding refermented cans, infected beers sold as "soured" variants, shelf turds, DDHyped secondary cans, etc then sure. I guess "it's back to there now."

 

I have no problem picking new beers to try, though I do look at ratings and reviews if I'm not sure. I have a long list of brewers that I trust, so anything from them is fine. What do you mean by bad? Styles you don't like? Expired? Infected? Too sweet/bitter/sour? Too many add-junks?

 

There has never been a time where so much good stuff was so widely available.

 

...and there has never been a time where so much bad stuff was so widely available.

 

I guess it is all in the eye of the beholder. In the early 80s when 98% of the beer was AALs, one would argue that at that time, there was very little of what folks now would deem good beer although those AALs worked ok most of the time.

I still stand by that the goods >> bads.

 

What do you mean by bad? Styles you don't like? Expired? Infected? Too sweet/bitter/sour? Too many add-junks?

 

Old? Yeah a lot of that .
That aside , the overall quality , availability, and variety has vastly improved.
Just have to check dates, & if there aren't any , pass or know it's a risk.
Helps if you're aware of the seasonality of the non-year-rounders. (Hint : following the WBAYDN? thread is helpful i that regard.)

 

Thanks for asking.

In my opinion, way too many breweries have opened without a solid idea of exactly what ‘good’ beer is. I had sampler after sampler at places where an off-flavor presentation is in order. From diacetyl and DMS to infections resulting from poor sanitation practices, these places continue to churn out barrel after barrel of bad beer.

Now, keep in mind that I’m a geek, not a snob. But if you are taking my hard-earned dollars in exchange for your product, I feel that it needs to be clean and drinkable. If you need to ‘dial it in’, then you shouldn’t have served me that product in the first place.

 

Wait, there was a "wave" when there was no bad or defective "craft" beer?
Why didn't anyone let me know?

 

Wow, guess I've been lucky. We do have a number of upstarts where they don't innovate much, or take much risk. But haven't encountered any bad beer - yet. Closest I've come is metallic-tasting beer from a dirty tap line in a restaurant.

 

I don't know about that. A good chunk of my life was when there was pretty much no such thing as craft beer. Pretty sure The Beer Advocate was not around to document this period.

 

I thought a geek would do his/her research before setting themselves up for disappointment

 

Certainly, in the last 4-5 years to an extent some breweries just lived by the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy.

as another commenter said, if I know a brewery and trust them, I'll but anything as long as I like the style. But if it's something I've never heard of, I'll do a check on ratings etc.

 

In my opinion the 'ratio' of good craft beer vs. bad craft beer is region specific. I am very fortunate that in my area (SEPA) the majority of craft beer product is of good quality (and often high quality). In contrast I went to a beer festival in Central PA with the majority of beer from small, local craft breweries and I dumped a lot of mediocre beers that day.

So, depending on where you live there can indeed be a lot of lesser quality craft beer being produced. I count my lucky stars that I don't live there.

Cheers!

 

Craft beer is 1000000x better than it was when I started drinking it back in 2013.

Yes there are crappy ones, but distro is much better and the good breweries are producing great things.

 

Agreed. To an extent. There is so much great stuff available that old beer is becoming a serious issue.

 

I wasn't drinking craft beer in the mid-80s to know for sure, and I'm not a beer historian, but I'm thinking that in that time period the number of craft breweries could be counted on two hands (or so). These were the ground-breakers who likely didn't know fully what they were doing and had no QC other than the brewer to taste the beers, and he's just a bit biased. So it can be expected that some bad beers did get distributed because they needed income.

Some breweries distributed to a wide geographical area (I'm thinking Pete's or Bert Grant's) that caused some beers to be brewed good but were old when they hit store shelves.

And that leads to another factor which was the lack of knowledge of proper shelf life or the importance of refrigeration, and when combined with a minimal-sized craft beer market allowed beers to sit on warm shelves under bright lights for a long time.

I think any "waves" that have occurred was us today saying bye-bye to those horrid times, and what we have available today are 99% good to great beers.

 

I complete agree Wes. There's only so much I can buy when I walk into a store.

You know I rock the Buckeye state despite being from WV (living on the border) so I always gravitate toward the Ohio beers myself.

 

@Beer_Stan ....was drinking breast milk in the 80s..that made me feel old and laugh my ass off at the same time. I didn't use lol so that in of itself shows my age