Controversial Beer Opinions (Round Two)

Although I generally do not drink Macro adjuncts . . . the only beer I drink with steamed crabs (preferably from the Chesapeake Bay) is a macro . . . Natty Boh, Pabst, or Carling Black Label. However, never Bud. As for lactose . . . yuck.

 

Uh oh . . .

 

My last steamed crabs and beer combo was Stella Artois and that was a great combo as well.

Cheers to Crabs and AAL (or Pale Lager) beers!!!!!!!

 

As a Belgian, I fully agree!

 

This is gold, Sir....pure gold...

 

Funny timing, as last night I was discussing the desire to try a local brewery's top two lagers side-by-side. The release schedule has never made it popular in the ~4 years they've been open until now. The bar owner plans on doing the same side-by-side when the second lager goes on tap today/tomorrow.

I never would've believed that I'd be utterly jazzed up about doing a lager side-by-side, but here we are.

Conversely, all the flavor additives are starting to save me money since I just avoid the breweries who make flavor additives their norm.

 

Anymore I'm just grateful for the breweries making fruit smoothie sours and candy bar stouts, I've already got waaaay too much beer to choose between in front of me at the store so being able to ignore a chunk of the beer aisle is great!

 

The worst thing craft beer ever did was convince us that four 16 oz. beers was a better packaging option than six 12 oz (and charging us more for less beer).

Controversial take is that I was six packs back.

Secondly, I think everyone should have two beers in their fridge at all times: (1) Their favorite or popular "craft" beer and (2) something macro-adjacent. For instance, I often buy 12 packs of Allagash White and Pacifico on the same day (shout out to a $34 case of beer). This will please literally everyone who comes over.

No one wants to sift through your beer fridge.

 

I haven't had a controversial beer opinion in a long time, but I had my monthly beer (fourth year of my exile) , and I enjoyed it in a way better than I remember ever enjoying beer before. I think I always, through 40+ years of loving beer, never really gave it proper attention and consideration, even though I tried to, even though I thought I did. My controversial opinion is that many of us likely don't give our favorite beverage the real love and appreciation, the real consideration and attention that it deserves at the time we consume it.

 

I personally refer to this as the Haze Bros phenomenon. My first recollection of four-packs/16 ounce cans being a 'thing' was for Juicy/Hazy beers. Specifically in my area the Haze Bros would wait for hours to buy several four-packs of the weekly releases of Tired Hands beers. I always thought the whole situation was crazy (i.e., waiting for hours in the cold (and sometimes rain) to pay BIG bucks for 64 ounces of beer) but the Haze Bros were willing (and happy) to do this every week. Pretty soon I started seeing this format (four-pack/16 ounce cans) at my local beer retailers (e.g., Retail Beer Distributors).

Thankfully during those times (and even today) I can still purchase a large selection of high quality beers in the six-pack format (most recently Sierra Nevada Celebration). I prefer to not purchase beers in the four-pack/16 ounce format and I wish I could say I never do but there are some craft breweries that only package in this format and there are some beer brands that I want to drink.

In my perfect world all of the craft breweries would 'go back' to packaging in the six-pack/12 ounce format but I know that will never happen. There is a substantial portion of the craft beer consumer market that seem to want to purchase a lesser amount of beer (i.e., 64 ounces) at elevated pricing and there are many craft breweries happy to service those customers.



Cheers!

 

I never stopped going, and usually swing through once or twice a month to one of their locations. Plus multiple bars in the area usually have something of theirs on tap.

They forever ruined their core IPAs (Congress, Fort Point) to my palate. But a lot of their newer IPAs are damn good.

 

So, exactly what happened here? Why did they 'forget' to produce these brands well?

Why do they have the 'magic' for newer products but not for their old brands?

Something odd here.

Cheers!

 

Agreed. I actually drain poured DDH Vicinity last time I had it, which is crazy as it used to be my favorite one from them. I had all new stuff last week.

 

me too

 

I think this is a backwards reading of the recent history of craft beer packaging. I don't think that the 16 oz can re-emerged as a way to charge more per oz, rather I think that it was picked out by breweries wanting to release beers that they didn't think they could release at prices competitive with the typical craft offerings of the time. Back then (what, 15 years now since beers like Heady Topper first started to package in 4x16?) big craft brands were selling beers around $7-9 a 6 pack, and I don't think that these newer breweries (who likely still had a lot of foundational debt to service) could produce these particular beers (ales emphasizing heavy doses of post boil hops) and bring them to market for anywhere near that. So instead of sitting next to snpa or sabl on the shelf, in the exact same package, for nearly twice the price, they chose to present in a different packaging format that instead invited comparisons to the pint at the bar pricing (yeah, it's $4/pint can but it's $6/pint at the only other source for it!).

Then, you see situations like this;

And pretty soon new breweries are opening with that model underpinning their financial projections they pitched to investors and older breweries watching their market share slide to this new format and having to choose how to react.

This underlines the problem with the logic of seeing the 4x16 as a mechanism for breweries raising their prices. Where are all the breweries that used to sell 6x12 at a cheaper price per oz? What I see is breweries that only ever sold packaged beer as 4x16 at basically the same price point since they started, or more legacy brands that sell their 4x16 offerings at the same (sometimes slightly lower) prices per oz than their 6x12.

This the kind-of wholesome and indispensable advice that every young beer nerd needs from the beer father figure they may have never had.

 

They openly changed the fermentation profile years ago.

https://twitter.com/trilliumbrewing/status/994231170664747008

I looked it up on Beeradvocate, and lo and behold I started a thread about it, with a poll. People seemed to agree the core beers suffered more.

https://www.beeradvocate.com/commun...ke-trilliums-new-fermentation-profile.600711/