Is non-craft really that bad?

Edit- yeast is OK too i suppose

 

You should just work on SomethingPunctuated first.

 

Good point, besides going out of your way to get that amazing, sought-after beer, there is nothing quite like visiting a small start-up brewerry with tons of potential and lots of experimentation, ie. tired hands/ Cellarmaker.

 

People would really have the "best available" no matter who makes it? That seems insane. I think supporting companies that care about beer and their communities is important. The big brewers only care about money and the people that run them would just as quickly be running oil companies or investment banks. They aren't beer people. Beer Advocates are supposedly beer people, so why not support beer people?

 

I blame the large brewers for the near death of beer in this country and it was only due to the passion of the new generation of brewers that we have anything interesting to drink in this country. This is a war for the soul of beer: industrial commodity beer or local, flavorful, interesting beer. I guess "craft" has become so popular that people forget that the big brewers would still like to put every small brewer out of business and go back to producing only a few versions of the same shitty light lager.

 

Non-craft is bad, mmmkay?

 

Man, don't you realize that each and every member of BA's first beer was either a Heady Topper, Founder's Breakfast stout or a BA Dark Lord?

 

Bad? No. Boring? Yes.

 

I rarely buy the same beer more than a couple of times. There is so much variety in good beer with great new beers arriving daily, that it's easy to buy something new every time I shop. So, if the macros made something decent, I'd probably try it once.

 

For the time being, I have no issues with non-craft "craft" beer. What matters the most to me is the quality of the beer I'm tasting. I don't drink Bud, Miller, Coors, etc. because I don't like they way they taste. There are a lot of so-called "craft" beers that I don't really like the taste of either.

And outside of a few practices from BMC that seek to stifle competition (saturating the market with "hidden" brands, using their size to pressure retailers and distributors into carrying their beer instead of smaller, "craft" brewers, etc.), I think they are, for the most part, reputable companies. They seem to pay/treat their workers well, they care about putting out a product that meets their standards (even if I don't personally prefer those standards) and generally conduct business in an honest way.

As long as smaller, "craft" brewers continue to enjoy the kind of success we're seeing right now and I continue to have the kind of choices I have today, I don't have a problem with buying the occasional ABInBev produced/owned beer because I like it (looking at you, Goose Island). Now if we start to see signs that ABInBev is strangling the market and killing off smaller brewers in the process, I think my purchase habits will likely change pretty significantly.

 

Out of 10 average beer purchases, 7 will be craft (with an emphasis on local) and 3 will be non-craft. Sometimes I want a six pack of Olympia or Guinness because that will hit the spot better.

 

To answer the thread title as I perceive it: No. Non-craft (mass market, BMC type beer) is not that bad in the same way that fast food isn't that bad... It's simple mediocrity, and sometimes that hits the spot well enough. There's a time and place for just about everything.

This poll got a very tentative "yes" from me: good beer is good no matter who produces it, or in what type of volume. To hell with the Brewers Association and their watered down, half-ass definition. I'm not sure why their ever-increasing definition of "small" factors in at all, yet that's what has ended up as the heart of the definition. If Big Beer wanted to produce a world-class beer and mass market it, they could, and yet it would not be a craft beer? Goose Island doesn't produce craft beer? Please. GI may be sellouts, but they definitely produce better beer than many, many "craft" breweries out there.

That being said, I'm not sticking up for Big Beer at all. I answered "yes" tentatively because you simply said "non-craft", but the purchase depends on more than just beer quality. Even if they produced a killer IPA and sold it for $6 a sixer, I'd try it to see what the fuss was about, but I wouldn't be a regular customer. I think the BMC machine mostly manufactures profit-driven, mass-produced, lifeless products, and I can't get behind that. The very nature of mega brewers conjures up thoughts of questionable business principles and practices, which does make a difference to me and a lot of other folks. I don't like their deceitful marketing tactics, strong-arm distributing tactics, and the ridiculous (albeit effective) advertising that aims at the vast population of sheeple. The bottom line is: I'd much rather support a brewery that is not owned by or affiliated with a mega-brew conglomerate, even if that conglomerate is producing what is craft beer in my book.

 

I love Guinness Draught (and it was pretty much all I drank before getting introduced to craft beer), but it's crazy how different it tastes to me these days. I still enjoy it, but I'm sad to say that it really doesn't hold up to the craft beer I drink now.

 

Blue Moon line isnt that bad but the Shock Top line is terrible. Ive tried several of their beers and its just a terrible excuse for a macro doing craft.

 

So, the reason why I wouldn't buy a quality "craft beer" from a big macro brewery is because I am sentimental towards the breweries that caught my attention and actually made me realize how special of an experience and adventure beer can be. Some of those breweries were originally Rogue, 3 Floyds, Southern Tier, Dogfish Head, Goose Island, Great Lakes, New Belgium and Founders among others to be sure.
Yeah GI might've been bought by A-B, but I feel like the GI beer hasn't deteriorated as a result, yay. That being said, I would rather support little breweries, or bigger breweries that began with a mission to make something excellent & tasty instead of economy and chuggability.

 

Blue Moon and Shock Top are not beer, they are flavored beer like beverages.

 

I voted both Yes and I don't want to support macro on principal. I disagree with the tactics and the lobbying and the deception that macro breweries participate in, but at the end of the day, if it's a good beer I'll wind up trying it.

Besides the dead horse example of Bourbon County, I keep hearing how good Ballantine IPA is, made by Pabst (ok, not AB-InBev, but still not really 'craft') and I can't wait to try it.

 

I didn't vote because none of the choices matched my response. Recently had the Ballantine IPA and it changed my thinking. I'm not opposed to Macro related beer as long as there's substance and good taste.

 

If you find out a beer you love were made by a big brewer and that lessens your enjoyment of it, then you are basing your opinion on more than just what's in the your pint glass. That either makes you pretentious or principled, depending on your perspective.

Maybe you enjoy the story behind the brew. You want to know who brewed it, how, why, you want to have a sense of the artisan behind the product. Maybe you just like to be able to shake the hand that fills you mug. Maybe you feel that there's something better about buying something (whether it be beer or a tomato) that is produces according to tradition by someone in your own community or its place of origin. Maybe you enjoy things more when they have a history, a heritage, dare I say... an authenticity to them. Maybe to you beer is not just about a sensory experience but is also about the crafting of the product. That is, after all where the word "craft" comes from, is it not? Anyone who thinks the evil empire can produce a beer worth drinking is a fascist pig. Not you; they won't catch you goose-stepping out of the tavern. In fact, tonight you're going to that new Kava bar anyway. It tastes like dirt, but it's good for you and it's served in a coconut shell, amid live poetry (at least, you are told it's poetry and you dare not contest that fact, lest you be looked down on by the rest of your nonconformist hipster friends for having an opinion that, by differing from theirs, sounds soooo 'conventional').

On the other hand, maybe you are practical and down to earth. Maybe you respect quality and results and not necessarily process and origin. Good ol' American pragmatism, perhaps? Maybe, to you, all that stuff about 7 different varieties of single origin, organic, fair trade hops and 7 varieties of special malts roasted by dwarves in the bowels of the Earth, with yeast collected in the vacuum of space by the spirit of Mary as she ascended to Heaven... maybe that all just sound like a bunch of crap. Maybe you just care about what the stuff in your snifter actually tastes like. Is it delicious? Then who cares about the rest! If you can buy it at Wal-Mart, all the better, but really you hope they start carrying it at Sam's Club. More tastes better than less, or at least you thought it did, but after number 7 you've lost track what it tastes like any way. But you're still pretty sure that cheaper tastes better than less cheap, even if it does happen to be brewed by 5 year old filipinos for 3 cents an hour with water straight from Fukushima (that's what gives it that nice glowing color and the taste of suffering just helps you feel better about your own pathetic lower-middle-class existence).

But, I'm disinclined to jump on either side of the dichotomy, because it all descends into mere polemics anyway. The truth is, the industry will always be playing catch up to the small local artisans, whatever the product. The establishment can't also be the avante garde, because that is the fundamental tension that is always trying to, but never quite can, resolve itself. It's a sort of dialectic, where the big businesses want to seem hip, cool, and ground breaking, but they can't take risk to do something different. Nor does their economy of scale lend itself particularly well to favoring quality over quantity. Quality, after all, is something which only a minority of people care about, whether we are talking about beer, wine, cheese, or indeed tomatoes). But, as the artisans push the envelope, the overall quality, goes up for everyone, as the bar is continually raised. Sort of. Some times it is a shell game, to be sure. Sort of the way you can now buy "lobster ravioli with truffle-butter-parmesan sauce" in the freezer section at Target (not even making that one up! I'll give you a hint, it doesn't contain real lobster or real truffles, but it has a lot of other stuff and tastes like... flavor). That frozen, mass-produced knock-off is not going to ever be anything but a weak imitation of what you might get at that posh farm-to-table place downtown that charges $25 per entree. But, that's not to say there aren't some decent frozen meals out there, nor to say they aren't getting better on the whole than they were 15 years ago when Hungry Man and Kids Cuisine were the only options. I still remember trying to get those "brownies" out of the little paper trays... ah, memories.

Me? I don't hate PBR, and I can drink Shock Top, Sam Adams, Blue Moon... but I wouldn't say I actually "like" them. I may drink them at someone else's party in the same way I pick stuff off the veggie-dip platter. You know the platter I'm talking about: the tasteless, baby carrots, pre-skinned and slightly white because they are dried out from the 1,000 mile road from in the refrigerated truck ride from... God knows where... sprayed with... God knows what. They sure don't taste like the carrots I get from the farmer's market--the purple or yellow ones grown from some heirloom variety that is way more labor intensive to grow and has a fraction of the yield, so a single carrot costs about as much of a bag of those aforementioned franken-carrots? Yeah. I think you get the point. Bad? No. Just... empty and devoid of all meaning and substance. But... cheap! Readily available! In quantity! And vaguely resembles a carrot-like thing, if you close your eyes and focus on it really hard. Is that not the craft beer vs macro brew distinction in a nutshell? But, if it's Bud Light, or (*shutter*) Molson or something... I'll pass altogether, thanks. Not worth the calories. In fact, even if they burned calories I think I'd pass.

Of course, it's not all that simple. Some "craft" brewers are quite large now-a-days, which as long as quality doesn't fall off is not inherently bad. But, often scaling up does come at a price. Not only quality, but often a bit of soul. At first, success means you have more resources to be more daring, focus more on quality... the next thing you know, your investors are risk adverse and concerned about showing a quarterly profit, and that cotton-candy porter brewed with pickled herring that you tried last year failed pretty hard. Now they want you to focus more on broadening your appeal! The garage band becomes the pop sensation. The edgy director whose film took Sundance by storm and blew up the local art theater is now trying to pump out PG-13 romantic comedies and family films. This is just life.

Do some manage to balance success and integrity? Yes! It's possible. But hard, and they are in the minority. Even when they do manage to succeed, the critics are less impressed as time goes on, looking for the next secret, hidden gem. The reviews suffer, the trendy crowd no longer feels your brew defines how unique they are and they start looking for something more exclusive. They... start drinking Miller Lite and praise it for being so "subtle" in flavor, and so "refreshing" on the palette... not like that thick, alcohol-laden, mainstream Belgian crap all the squares are drinking. They can't be caught dead drinking Dog Fish head, those guys are posers... that's what Grandma drinks! So, while it's true (in my opinion) that we'll never reach parity and the big brewers are playing a fundamentally different game than the craft brewers, it's also true they could trade places. Some might be raging against the machine in search of some transcendental sense of "authenticity", but they are trying to hit a moving target. Best to be a little more humble and retain some humility on the subject. Be a beer snob, be pompous, just don't be surprised or depressed when you find all your favorite "craft" brewers become sell outs and don't hate yourself if you still enjoy something that was brewed more than a keg at a time or more than a block away (foreign import store not withstanding, but of course!).

I wish the world were simpler. Or, maybe I don't. Maybe that would be boring. It's much more interesting to live in a dynamic world where today's craft brew might be tomorrow's run-of-the-mill brew. To bring it back to reality, I think any reasonable person wants better beer all around and would be happy if the mainstream kicked up its game. The thinking person, though, can't help but be a bit cynical ("realistic"?) about what that really means. The sane person just laughs at the idiots on both sides, accepts the world as it is, finds some healthy balance between the two, and pours a glass of whatever happens to be on tap that they've been enjoying lately.

Cheers!