The Problem with Turning Beer into Dessert

Agree. But when your favorite beers are replaced by them on the shelves, then it could become a problem.


My opinion, I have a feeling the whole dessert beer trend will come full circle. Super Size and Big Macs were popular twenty years ago, before a turning point occurred that made in an unpopular and unhealthy to make those choices. Drinking dessert beers does not seem to be a sustainable lifestyle in the long run, so I suspect that trendy "session" beers and other alternatives will be released to help with the fatigue.

What happens to some of the more original lagers though? I share the same worry that some of the "session" dessert beers could wipe out the popularity with the more traditional styles.

 

FWIW, I had some Hop Showers and ACE last month and they were both every bit as delicious as I remembered them beinc. They’re running a business so you can’t expect them not to chase after where the money is....in my opinion at least.

 

Please elaborate what hop showers and ace are? I have no idea.

 

I can't help but think forums, like this one, are responsible for this shift (at least, in part). There was, at one time, a focus on encouraging others to get creative with home brewing, or take up randaling (sp?) to impart new flavors to a beer.

Now those people have opened businesses.

Sounds like it was novel and fun when others were doing it, but now that it's caught on with general market consumers, it's obtuse and offensive.

 

Don't get me wrong, I've cut ties with my favorite local brewery over their current production. Based on conversations with people in the industry, it sounds like that brewery should come back around once they're open for on-site consumption, but in the meantime, I haven't been able to have their beers for over a year.

Is this unfortunate? Absolutely. Am I still drinking great beers? God damn right. But someone else is making them now.

(And yes, I do miss Stone's RIS, but to be honest, I'd only buy maybe a bottle a year at this point anyway.)

 

Well those kitchen sink kind of beers are what I'm talking about, I'll use Drekker's 'Slang Du Jour' series as a concrete example. The adjunct list (and this is excluding the rotating fruit(s) addition) includes granola, brown sugar, cinnamon, lactose, and vanilla beans. The beer is as thick as the heaviest stouts you can find and swirling the glass you can literally see the bits of granola.

On paper there's a lot that could go wrong but in practice they nail it. The fruit additions and other sources of sugars are balanced by the lactic acid, never too sharp, never cloyingly sweet, just layers of rich juicy flavor where you can't tell exactly where the beer ends and the adjuncts start. Then the malt, granola, brown sugar and cinnamon really ground the rest of the flavor with kind of a 'pie crust' finish that lingers on the back of palette.

The end result is a can of beer that I would gladly take over the dessert it's trying to represent, is it the pinnacle of brewing? hell no, but its certainly delicious and isn't that all you can ask for in a beverage?

 

Actually I think you have said quite a bit more than that using some pretty critical terms..." surrender to vulgarity"?...what? because the brewer selects a style you find offensive?

 

The basic definition of dessert is "the sweet course eaten at the end of a meal." So a "dessert beer" is drunk at the end of what? Key lime pie is a dessert usually eaten at the end of a meal. A key lime sour, I can drink before, during and/or after a meal.

Me thinks the real issue is sweetness and the number of beers now being produced with various levels of sweetness. Dansac mentioned "milkshake ipas with no bitterness but high tropical sweetness and creaminess." The milkshake IPA's I've had from Westbrook were more bitter and far less sweet than the actual fruit. I've had the Raspberry Cheesecake IPA from Untitled Art which still had some bitterness of an IPA and was nowhere as sweet as a raspberry cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. In IPA's I do tend to those that are tropical connotations to them but the ones I prefer are still hop forward and anyone who doesn't like IPA's still won't like them. And I recently bought some Waldos Special. Talk about dank!

I also noticed in Dansac's post that he focused on just a few breweries. I would need to use my fingers and my toes to count the number of different breweries I have a beer from in a typical month. The beer bars and beer stores I visit here haven't been taken over in any shape or form by dessert beers and I have no problem finding a wide selection of classic IPA's, pale ales, stouts, etc. And I'm in Montgomery, AL which doesn't come close in selection to choices available in Birmingham, Atlanta, Nashville, Ft. Worth, etc.

The only way that I see this "trend" as a problem is if you primarily drink beers from a narrow range of styles or at a brewery which will have a smaller selection of beers than beer bars and beer stores. If so, that to me is a self-induced problem. I enjoy any style that's done well and there's only one brewery in Montgomery and less than 1% of my beer consumption is from them. And within 2 hours driving distance there are enough breweries, beer bars and beer stores with a large enough selection to satisfy most of the pickiest.

 

But whats the root of the problem, greedy brewers chasing the latest trend to make more money? Or is it a passe product that no longer garners interest and is in low demand? And when it comes to replacing those brands do we expect another anachronistic style just to please the folks who were there when the brewery was in its infant years? Or should they meet market trends and demand by making something that appeals to their customer base?

As amazing as it would be if brewers could make the most funky, unique beer they desire it's a reality that breweries are businesses with employees who have to keep the lights on and food in their stomachs.

While its a shame when your old favorite isn't an option anymore reduction on the supply side increases demand for other options and helps keep a style ubiquitous even if the options are reduced.

 

Are you saying you think that the characteristic you're talking about are the result of extracting more hop oils into the beer? Thinking its some technique that the breweries employ to extract hop oils more efficiently?

 

It's also worth mentioning that smoothie-beers are in some ways more enjoyable or less painstaking to produce. Tweaking your house lager to be a little more this-or-that is a painstaking process, an error wastes gallons of product and can take months to realize. Smoothie beers with their cold-side additions can be worked thru in a matter of hours with near instant feedback.

Bit of a double-edged sword as the ease of production has certainly contributed to their ubiquity and that ubiquity is why subpar examples of the style have come out in force. Yet for the brewers who are really passionate about this new fangled mixology it allows a lot of tweaking in a short period of time and weekly rotations without months of prep has become very possible.

 

Correct.

 

And just because you like Beethoven, Brahms, Miles, and Mingus doesn't make that music better in some objective way. I'm a classical music lover and, frankly, the arrogance and closed mindedness of some of my fellow classical lovers makes me sick to my stomach.