From brand loyalty to style loyalty?

I've never understood that mentality. Style preference I can understand...style exclusivity I cannot. It takes away a big part of what it means to be a fan of beer or BEERAdvocate. Instead you'd just be a StoutAdvocate or IPAdvocate. Not that there's anything wrong with that as they're both beers in their own right, but it just takes away from the craft as a whole if you don't give other styles a fair shake.

There are definitely styles out there that I'm not particularly fond of but I can certainly appreciate them for what they are and what they're intended to be.

 

I'm a beer man. I like beer.

 

Style exclusivity sounds like an awful way to live. Variety man.

 

There are people who "just like IPAs" and I don't mean hop-heads. They got into the craft beer game, chased great IPAs and forgot that sours, stouts, saisons and everything in between were also great beers. I tried to start a thread a while back calling these folks "hop junkies" but no one bought it.

 

Very rarely is pigeonholing yourself a good idea.

 

Damn...I'm not even beer-loyal. I'm sipping Plantation XO 20th anniversary rum as I type this.

 

I am more into brand loyalty than style loyalty. But by brand loyalty I don't mean one particular brand, I mean a large group of brands to which I am loyal. For example, I love Stone and I love IPAs, but if Stone puts out a beer that is not an IPA, I'm most likely going to try it. The same holds true for any other brewery to which I am loyal - this is my idea of brand loyalty. On the other side, I love IPAs. But I'm not going to buy a new IPA from a brewery that I don't respect just because it is a new IPA - this is my idea of not being style loyal.

 

I'm a fan of good beer that I can drink. Unfortunately, that excludes a handful of styles due to genetic mandate, as well as a handful of breweries that tend towards heavy-handedness with the hops. Ergo, I sort of have the opposite of the described condition - an aversion to particular styles and/or breweries.

I like to think that otherwise, I'm fairly open to beer experiences - even if I stick to "known good" beer around 60-70% of the time, and hesitate before trying something from a brewery I'm not familiar with.

 

For some reason, a couple of the responses so far in this post refer to style exclusivity. Loyalty and exclusivity are mutually exclusive terms.
Loyalty is defined as a strong feeling of support or allegiance.
Exclusivity is defined as a state of being limited or hard to access.

The OP was asking about shifting loyalty from brands to styles. How the hell does that translate to exclusivity of any kind? And yes, I may be nitpicking but when you use the wrong words or don't comprehend the words that someone else uses, it results in misunderstandings and confusion.

And just so this is beer related - you can easily have both brand loyalty and style loyalty; if you are inclined to pick up a 6er of Sierra Nevada pale ale every time you buy beer, you have brand loyalty and may have style loyalty if most of what you buy are pale ales. However, if SNPA is all you buy every time you buy beer, you have brand and style exclusivity.

 

Eh

To say that the two terms are mutually exclusive would be to imply that you can't be both loyal and exclusive to one style, which isn't true.

 

I like to try everything so I don't have any exclusivity but I do have some brand loyalty. For example, I'll try the upcoming Bell's Oatsmobile beer just because I like Bell's a lot and trust them to make a good one. I think a lot of people do stuff like this and for better or worse it really encourages breweries to make a ton of variants. I have never been a Ballast Point fanboy but anyone who is would have been busy lately with all their new releases.

 

I stand corrected. But I'm still whacked out about the word switch some responses made.

 

I'll also stand corrected in that I could have chosen a better term. You can definitely be loyal to a style without being exclusive. It was just stuck in my head after reading "All I drink is IPA" in the OP.

Regardless, all these semantics are giving me a headache...let's get back to the beer talk!

 

I love DIPA's. It's the first thing I'm going to look for when I walk into the store.

But.

I'm also loyal to certain breweries. Most weeks I'll visit either Hill Farmstead, Trillium, Jack's Abby or Tree House - they're each about a two hour drive from my house - and I'll load up on whatever I can get my hands on. The hoppy stuff gets drunk-up first, then the darker stuff. I love it all.

But I really, really like a big IPA.

 

I would say I'm a variation of this 'style loyal' in that I will, between say a new stout or new saison, go with the saison pretty much everytime with rare exception. That is the extent though as I am game to try anything different/new/unique that I find.

 

There are many styles I like and many breweries I like. When the Venn diagram overlaps with the third circle (availability), I drink what's in the overlap.

 

I try to be more region-loyal, but more often than not I will just buy whatever catches my eye.