Is this where craft beer is heading?

Shhhh...quiet you!

 

Did anybody see that new Omnipollo beer? A 15% imperial stout brewed with--among other things--potato chips, pretzels, and lactose?

 

I go back and forth if omnipollo is really putting these ingredients in the beer or are trolling the masses.

 

And (unfortunately IMO) that is indeed the case for a segment of the craft beer drinking community.

FWIW the crazy artwork on cans works in an opposite way with me. When I see abstract and dazzling can art I choose not to buy those beers. The 'boring' labels is where I am at.

Maybe there are sufficient numbers of beer drinkers in both camps (i.e., crazy artwork, 'boring' artwork) to keep the varying craft breweries going?

Cheers!

 

Two local breweries that do have really cool can labeling/art work are Fieldwork and Alvarado Street and they both back it up with outstanding product. Plenty of other examples as well, but alas, some customers in an endless sea of rack space are drawn to what can looks the best, at least in craft beer bottle shops.

In the Supermarket space, it's all about cost. The least expensive, often times in 12 or 24 packaging format wins out.

 

And don't forget the 15 packs that seem to be popular now. Founders puts out reasonable quality beer at very reasonable prices for their 15 packs.

Cheers!

 

absolutely 100% agree.

I tend to extend the prejudice to most sophomoric names and labels, especially takes on weed. I see the whole “tee-hee-hee” nature of weed jokiness akin to if one gave the same treatment to smoking a cigarette or putting in a dip. Ya, you dig weed, good for you....

 

Young folks don't want to drink 15 of the same reasonable quality beer. At least I don't. The money me and my friends spend on beer are toward big bold flavors. I'll buy an omnipollo stout over a founders 15 pack anyday even if it cost more. That or it's hard seltzers

 

Well, some people are buying those beers.They are brisk sellers at one of my local Retail Beer Distributors according to the owner/manager. He says they are popular since they are a good deal.

Cheers!

 

Yeah but there no money to be made on those 15 packs. I know the cost for retailers in NYC is 13.99 and if they are selling for 15 then that's not very smart. How do you pay taxes rent and your employees a livable wage making a dollar on a 15 pack. Retailers are really under selling these things and they won't be in business long

 

It seems like the fancier the label, the harder it is to find any info about the beer. Too many brands have to be picked up and turned and studied to find the style, ABV, etc. Ponderous, man, ponderous.

 

All weird beers aside, there are new breweries everywhere on any side of new styles and old standards. Our new beer culture has room for history and grandiose experiments. How can this be bad?

 

If I'm looking closely at a bottle or can of beer, I'm looking for the born on date. Although if it wasn't for a cool Raging Bitch bottle about ten years ago it may have taken me longer to get into good beer, and if some young chick or dude sees a cool label and gets into good beer then I don't give a shit and I welcome it

 

These comparisons are always interesting, but for as far back as you care to look at the top lists here on BA, they have always been dominated by beers that were either:

1) rare/hard to get
2) high ABV
3) very hoppy for their time
4) strongly flavored
5) some combination of 1-4

The relevant change is arguably that with ~6000 breweries opening in the past 10 years what counts as "extreme" has become an increasingly frantic game of whack-a-mole to keep outdoing what came before in order to cater to that same segment of the market. I can't claim to have done a terribly deep dive on this but that's what a gloss of the available data suggests to my eyes.

Here's the top 100 from 2005. It's not exactly overflowing with traditional pilsners, plain stouts, and moderately hopped low ABV pale ales. The average ABV of the whole list is 8%.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050325005410/http://beeradvocate.com/top_beers.php

 

Just a quick look at that list it does seem a lot more diverse style wise than the current list

 

I guess this is a perfect example of individual tastes, because I can't stand the 80's schtick that Alvarado does on their cans. They make good to great beer, but that kind of trend-chasing with can art completely turns me off.

 

These guys FINALLY showed up in Seattle, GREAT beer and can art of horror movie caliber. I love it.

https://www.nightmarebrewingco.com/brews

 

Dammit Beasley

 

You're totally right that it does. But I think what's most relevant is that the additional styles were still almost exclusively boozy and/or strongly flavored - its not as if things like milds, grisettes, or helles ever loomed large. What changed might be that US brewers simply started filling that boozy and extreme niche with things like DIPAs.

Just as an example, in 2005 there were 23 Belgian beers on the list and 19 of them were Quads, Tripels and Strong Ales (average of 9.3% ABV). In 2019, there are 17 Belgian beers in the top 250 and 13 of them are lambics or guezes with an average ABV of 6%. Did Quads and such drop out because people got simple minded in their tastes or because they could get their strongly flavored boozy beer fix elsewhere more easily and cheaply as time went on?

I wouldn't claim to have a definitive answer based on my shallow dabbling in historical top lists here on BA, but I do think it's an oversimplification to broadly assume that drinkers of yore were inherently more varied/refined than current drinkers. If today's beer environment were available back in 2005 I don't think it's a given that drinkers of that era would be behaving any differently than drinkers today.

 

Agree completely, I definitely prefer the most artistic part of a beer to be inside the package.