Why is craft beer so hard?

Seriously, some people on BA treat buying a freakin' beer as if they purchasing their first home.

 

People don't like mass production lagers because they are incredibly boring and the cool thing to hate. It's easy to drink them even if you don't "like" them because they are lightly flavored water. A bad IPA is not easy to consume and I'm sure you understand that but the hyperbole was too good to pass up.

 

If anything it's the opposite... there is SO MUCH good beer out there... not so little...

The hard part is trying all of it

 

This has been my thought throughout this entire thread. I actually very rarely read ratings before drinking a new beer for the sole reason that i do not want it to cause me to have a preconceived notion. Everyone has different tastes. There are plenty of beers that I really enjoy that have lower ratings, there are plenty of beers I don't care for that have great ratings, and there are plenty of beers where my opinion is in alignment with the masses.

 

You guys really had me..then I noticed it was posted on April fools day. That was awesome," (whine) why is craft beer so hard?" I love you guys..shit like that is why I joined this site.

 

Tell me more about your beer problems living in Ohio.

 

Sad but true.

 

you were able to "return" a beer after ordering it?

 

I've had the same experience. Unfortunately many don't see how others' consumption behaviors affect yours, mine. It does. Tap lines change. Store shelves change. And the kind you describe ARE replacing much better regional or national brewery's beers.

 

Say it isn't so

 

Are you asking why it's so hard for the consumer or why it's so hard for the producer to make a decent product?

 

agree if the population of reviews is low --- under 25 or so -- but for the typical beer/score that has a decent size population of reviews - I find the reviews generally be correct as tuned to my palate most of the time. For me -- and my love of IPA/DIPA/Pales - I find the magic 90 score mark to be a berometer for what I will go an spend (or trade) my hard earned $ for. No different than buying a car and doing my research on consumer reports/kelly blue book yada yada yada. It's on of the things I love most about BA -- google a beer and typically the BA link/rating is at the top of the list.

 

Bad beer is not always the brewer's fault - there are a lot of bad things that can happen between the end of the packaging line and the glass. Bad beer lines are one. Last summer some friends and I were at a beer festival one brewer has clear beer lines exposed to the bright August sun. We suggested that he cover his beer lines. He knew more than we did and did not cover his lines. Within a couple of hours he beer was skunky. Many bars skimp on cleaning out their lines. Some bars with huge selections have kegs that are too old to serve. Many distributors push out of date beer onto their accounts or require them to buy more that they can reasonably turn over.

Then there are the retailers. I worked in a grocery store in high school and every morning the produce manager would go through his product and remove anything that looked too old and throw it out. How many retailers go through their stock of beer to weed out the out of date stuff? August Busch rose to the top because he had a mania about quality - he would visit retailers and weed out the out of date stock. He made sure refrigerated rail cars delivered his product and he insisted that it be stored in refrigerated warehouses. Without that kind of mania from the end of the pacaging line to your glass, we are going to be stuck with crap on occaision.

What can we do? We need to insist on bottle dates on packaging. If we buy bad beer from a retailer, take it back and if they don't make it right, shop somewhere else. If the bar or restaurant's beer tastes like crap tell the bartender and again, if they do not fix it, drink somewhere else.

From my experience, 90% or more of the beer is at least decent coming out of the brewery. Its what happens to it between the brewery and the glass where it gets screwed up.

 

But the opinions which lead to the creation and interpretation of those numbers are completely subjective.

 

See I think this is part of the issue. I picked up a six of Anchor IPA and thoroughly enjoyed it. There was nothing off or bad about the beer, it just had a very herby piney taste with a lot of bitterness. If anything it is just not a fashionable IPA. Ratings are helpful when a beer is genuinely poorly crafted, but when is sticking to a more traditional taste it gets penalized.

 

Not sure if this was mentioned already, but weren't adjuncts initially used (causing beer flavor to plummet) due to grain rationing during the Great Depression/Prohibition Eras???

 

In theory. I can't begin to count the number of times I've seen a post similar to this:"there's so many awesome beers out there, why should I drink anything ordinary? I think my average beer is a 4, and I rarely drinkanything below that, mostly I drink 4.3s and up."

These folks have themselves convinced that they only drink great beers, thus any beer they drink is great. So they score beers higher to fit their own criteria, falsely raising the overall. Grade inflation is a real thing.

 

Diacetyl can also be caused by dirty tap lines.

 

Agreed - until you compare across styles, as there is a clear bias to higher scores for certain styles - IPAs being one of them