Are We Killing Beer?

To answer the OP's subject question and after reading through this thread:

A resounding YES!!!!

 

...or ends up somewhere in between, but ya, this feels right.

 

I still suspect that a shakeout that stems from changed cultural preferences (such as consumers realizing en masse that they preferred alcopops to beer all along) hits the large and moderate-sized breweries harder than the small, locally-oriented ones, especially given that most of the small breweries, at least most of the ones outside of hip, urban areas, haven't gone far down the gimmick-beer rabbit hole and decidedly do not depend on the scenesters for their customer base.* When craft beer becomes uncool, it will pay never to have been cool in the first place. I could see the number of breweries in this country continue to grow substantially even if consumer demand for craft beer falls, with the breweries that have significantly expanded their output in recent years getting hammered. As @beersgud reminds us, many markets continue to be underserved, and the same goes for certain suburbs and exurbs within seemingly saturated markets as well as many small towns outside of them.

* If anyone diagrams that sentence, I owe him a beer.

 

Out of all the styles, I wonder who’ll come out with a black NEIPA....

 

A local place had a NE style brown ale for a while. It was ok, not something that I would drink regularly. They have a NEIPA that is actually pretty good.

 

no, just you

 

What's an NE style brown ale? I do know the east coast has quite a few examples of "English style" ales, so I'm optimistic.

 

I don't think we're killing it but we're for sure changing it. Regarding that quality ingredients for a plain beer, there is now more breweries doing that than ever but they tend to fall on the expensive side of the spectrum. Say Jester King, Hill Farmstead, etc.

So I'd say that this one of the most exciting times for beer, there's lots of experiments and I can't recall a time that it has been so easy to push someone into craft - thanks to some of that pastry brews. It's just different I guess.

Note that many brewers will eventually get tired of doing all of this stuff, riding the hype wave and getting safe when riding back is something only the best will be able to do.

 

Hmmm, my prediction is customers will continue to drive the marketplace, and successful brewers will continue to brew the beers those customers want to buy regardless of what styles they are

 

And while doing that, some Brewers will continue to also create/develop/brew new beers that customers didn’t know they wanted to buy until it was available.

 

You seem to be confused as to who is patronizing which types of establishments. By far and away, scenesters are the lifeblood of the small, local brewery, NOT the large regional or national ones. Normal people are what's keeping those breweries afloat and, IMO, are much more stable than their smaller cousins. Not sure how you figure that small breweries haven't gone very far down the gimmick beer rabbit hole. They are the very source of most of the gimmick beers that people are drinking. They are the ones on the bleeding edge of "innovation". Not the big breweries. They're far too set in their ways and stable to risk a lot on trying to make a brand new type of beer. For a guy that has a great deal of derision for NEIPAs, I thought you would have figured that out by now.

Again, the big craft breweries are big for a reason. They're stable enough to have survived the ups and downs of the growth and expansion of craft beer and themselves.

 

Granted this list is for what beers are pouring at the State Fair, which is kind of an all bets are off safe space for having abnormal, yet 'joyfully pained' gastronomical relations with what you just consumed.
It is a point to consider. But, considering it is for what it is for. Not so much.

 

I may be in the minority, but I find myself visiting breweries less and less due to the lack of variety. If I want a solid hefe or even a basic porter, I sure as hell aren't going to find these styles at any local brewery. Good thing the local shops still carry these styles.

I do understand the business side of it - NE IPA, pastry stouts, etc. are the big thing but folks will tire and move on eventually. Tastes change.

 

I'm 100% with you. I'll drink a local beer if it's on tap at a bar that I frequent and it's a style that I'm looking to enjoy. Right now that means just about anything other than NEIPAs or their evil milkshake step brothers.

A lot of locals around here are trying to make these styles of beer, but the issue is that there is no long term investment in those styles. The classics are usually one offs, either never to be brewed again or to be brewed with nouveau hops or yeast strains. Very few invest the time and energy to nail those classics and are more than happy to make one OK version of them, as if to say, "Look, we can do this. It's easy." Luckily, there are enough that have invested that I can find them if I should want. I just have to go a little out of my way to do so, but, IMO, it's worth it.

 

Only a small portion of the over 120 beers listed in the article to which I linked are being poured at the Minnesota State Fair, although I agree that the headline is misleading.

 

I agree that the majority of the Trendy Trinity*-focused breweries are small ones, usually located in hip, urban areas. But those still constitute a small minority of the small, taproom-focused breweries. Many small breweries are in suburbs, exurbs, and small towns and tend to focus on more traditional styles, with occasional entries into the hip fare that do little in practice to attract the scenesters and can be excised easily when tastes shift. They tend to depend on young families, middle aged folks, and retirees who don't exactly scream "cool" and may not have heard of NEIPAs let alone tried them. Those are the sort of breweries for which I think demand may prove steady if only because I think taproom culture is gaining a more entrenched cultural footing than is craft beer itself. There remain many populous suburbs and small towns that constitute the respective centers of rural areas that have no local brewery presence.

* Sweet / New England IPAs, pastry stouts, fruited kettle sours

Many of the big and medium-sized craft breweries were not big or medium-sized (or did not exist) at the time of the last "down" of growth and expansion, which, for craft beer specifically, was quite a ways back. They're hardly proven-hardy businesses. Many of those recently expanded breweries are heavily leveraged and built their expansion plans on unrealistically high sustained demand growth projections. When demand is ebbing, it's a lot harder to find enough people to want to buy 20,000 barrels (let alone 200,000) of your beer in a year than it is to find enough people willing to buy 400, especially when most of the latter have homes within a few miles.

 

More and more I am seeing non IPA's sit on shelfs both at breweries and stores. A local brewery released a BA stout that hasn't been available on bottle in about 2 years (last year they had found contamination in the barrels and had it only on tap for a short time). Back in 2015 or 2016 they had lines down the street on the day of the release and sold out that day and there were articles about it in the state newspaper. You can now get a bottle 2 months post release as well as a BA BarleyWine that was released 2 months prior to that.

So many non IPA releases that used to be hard to get seem to be easier and easier to get since the supply seems to be outstripping demand. If the problem isn't "they won't buy if they don't brew it" but is "they won't buy if its not an IPA" how do we change that? There is plenty of variety out there if you look but will this continue if more and more breweries seem to be penalized financially for brewing non IPA's? That's at least what I've started to notice very recently.

 

My personal experience in the breweries I've visited across the country has been even the small town taprooms focus almost entirely on IPA's. Every middle aged person I know knows what a NEIPA is. I was recently in the Ukraine and even there they had NEIPA's and were mostly focused on IPA's.

 

This is the most egregious example I have seen recently:

 

I brought this up in a regional thread. I definitely agree that there are clearly people that for some reason want to drink beer, but don't like the taste of malt or hops. I don't know why they don't just order a rum cocktail.

If a "beer" called Wild Berry Pineapple Puffsicle Schmoojee isn't fodder for a new Budweiser commercial, I don't know what is.