I like Belgian-style white beers. My favorite is made by Allagash.
I don’t know any of the techinal terms that are being used here. I just know what I like.
I like dark beers. Guinness is one of my favorites. Sam Adams stouts are good too. There’s a restaurant in town that has beers it brews on site, and a few of them are very tasty.
Yuengling Porter is only $7.19 a six pack here and it is my go to beer at home. Very tasty but doesn’t break you. I love the George Washington Tavern Porter but won’t often pay the price for it as it is usually over $10.
Yuengling Lager is my typical tap beer and is far superior to Bud, Miller, Coors and the like.
Breckingridge Vanilla Porter is another I enjoy. The price is reasonable around $8.50.
On the rare occasions I can find it, Saranac Porter is great and not too pricey but I have not seen it this year. Same with Leinenkugel’s Snowdrift Vanilla Porter. I was buying both as a treat last year and neither are around this year.
For nearly 20 years my go to beer was Bass Ale but since they were bought out by InBev I believe it has disappeared from taps. Newcastle Brown Ale, Smithwicks and Murphy’s Red Ale are all tasty ales I like.
I tend to like darker beers.
I will never forgive New Belgium for killing off Ranger.
For those who are getting tired of the IPAs (or, APAs), I think there is going to be a new style in the craft genre; sours. Their popularity seems to be rising in the homebrew crowds and they seem to lead the direction of craft brewing these days.
Last summer, I had a Berliner Weisse brewed by a buddy (and I generally don’t like sours) and I have to admit, it probably was the tastiest beer I’ve had in a long time.
The Voodoo Ranger is drinkable.
Attended the Pittsburgh BeerFest tonight. O.M.G. What an evening!
Sour beer is fairly well-established in the craft brewing market. It’s pretty much a given nowadays that a new brewery has to open for business with a barrel room, in which they inoculate and age beers with Brettanomyces and other fun bugs to create sours (I hate that term) that drinkers will pony up the big bucks for.
Obviously folks like Russian River and New Belgium have been doing this for over a decade, but there are a lot of breweries that are known for pretty much only sour beer: Jester King in Texas, Trinity in Colorado, Jolly Pumpkin in Michigan. The newer, smaller craft brewers, who admittedly make mostly hoppy beer, typically have one or two sour beers available at a given time, and it isn’t unusual to see them hold a release party for these special creations to generate hype.
Gose was a big thing a couple years ago, and Berliner Weiss is coming on now, as these are sour beer styles that can be brewed and fermented as quickly as your average IPA, so they don’t hog the fermenters in the brewery for long periods of time. That means they can be brewed year-round and satisfy the clamoring hordes whose first question to any bartender is, “What sours do you have on tap?”
Not really “going to be,” so much as it’s already here. The sours have been the big trend since about 2014. They were around here and there before that, but that’s about when I remember them becoming mainstream in the beer world.
What are the names of the beer styles for “sours” (assuming it’s not just “sours”)? I know about gueuze, and toured a gueuze brewery in Brussels a few years back (Cantillion, IIRC). And Lambic is another, I think. Are there others?
A gueuze (and its variant spellings) is a type of lambic: a mix of young and old unflavored lambics.
Off the top of my head, the main ones would be: Lambic (including gueuze, faro, kriek, etc) , Flemish reds, Berliner Weisse, gose, and the Belgian oud bruin browns. Oh, and there is an indigenous style called Kentucky Common which was thought to use a sour mash, but last I remember reading, it seems it didn’t.
It’s interesting for me, because about ten to twelve years ago I started getting interested in sours, and there were so few to choose from on the market. In a well-stocked beer store, I could find one Berliner Weisse–I forget which German brand, sold alongside some woodruff syrup that is traditional to mix it with, one gose (the Leipziger one), a couple of gueuzes (Hanssen’s and Cantillon), a smattering of too-sweet fruit lambics by Lindemans, maybe a Flanders red and oude bruin if you were lucky. Now it’s just nuts. Dozens upon dozens to choose from, with new categories like “sour stouts,” for instance.
Pittsburgh’s Draai Laag brewing brews only sours, and indeed produces some sours on the fringe. I recently had a peach farmhouse ale that had Penicillium roqueforti, the bacterium used in production of blue cheese, added to the beer as it was aging in oak casks. What a strangely delicious beer that was!!
ETA: if you are in Pittsburgh, hunt down Grand Blu. I’ve had it on draft and have a few bottles at home. It was a one-time thing.
I think you’re thinking more about German-style pilsners. There isn’t anything dry or “less thick” about real Czech pilsners. They’re actually some of the most malty beers out there, but are well balanced with a correspondingly high bitterness.
But I get what the OP is talking about; a lot of what we see being produced seems to be as much a product of boredom/creativity on the part of the breweries as it is a product of market forces.
In other words, people who like craft beer are pretty much self-selecting for trying new stuff, while the people who don’t try new stuff stick with the macrobrews.
So it’s probably really easy for the breweries to produce a funky new style of beer, and then confuse a lot of people trying it with there being an actual demand for it. That, I suspect is why craft beers tend to go in fad waves; it was porters, etc… for a while, then weird grains/rye beers, then super-bitter IPAs, and now sours. I suspect that a lot of people weren’t wild about any of those styles, but tried them to see. Meanwhile, the classic styles are back there getting solid if unspectacular sales.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, to find out that despite all the weird stuff Sam Adams and New Belgium put out all the time, that Boston Lager and Fat Tire consistently rank as some of their highest selling beers.
A pity, that. I consider both those beers to be absolute crap.
The rest of this post I totally agree with. Craft-brewers are like craft-anything…always looking for something new and different.
More Sam Adams for me! (Honestly, probably my favorite lager. I’ll leave the Fat Tire to someone else, though.)
But, yes, any successful brewery* is going to have a middle-of-the-roadish flagship brew that sells the most to keep the money coming in (and for many craft breweries, it actually is something a little more assertive like an APA or IPA) and then the side projects to keep the beer geeks interested and to have fun.
*OK, there’s niche market exception, but for the most part…
You’d be correct with that hunch. As the New Belgium brewers said to my friend once on the tour, the success of Fat Tire allows them the freedom – and funds – to try lots of new things. It’s their cash cow.
This was before they (and Sam Adams, too) bowed to public pressure and started brewing IPAs, but I’d be surprised if the Fat Tire and the Boston Lager weren’t still far and away the best sellers.
Lagunitas
Undercover
Investigation
Shut Down
mmmmm and in season now! You-tube the story, quite curious and funny!
I wasn’t saying they were awesome, but that they’re the “standard” beers that people drink when they’re not necessarily wanting a new experience. Which I suspect for most people is most of the time. I’m a pretty inveterate tryer of new things, and despite that, I still often just want a beer that’s not spectacular, but that I know I’ll enjoy. Doesn’t have to be anything spectacular- some of my go-tos are the Helles, Marzens or Pilsners of the Munich breweries (Spaten, Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr), or other German or German-style breweries like Warsteiner or Franconia (local German-style brewery).
My point was that a lot of these fads sell well because of novelty, not because people are that taken with them. I hear more bitching about Imperial/double IPAs and the like than I’ve ever heard anyone say happy, lovey things about them, yet I’m sure they sold like gangbusters, for example. I know I’ve bought a few six-packs of them myself to try different ones, and always come away thinking “That was… interesting, but not something I really want to have again.”
Very cool brewery, very good beers.
The story of this beer is familiar to me, and I’ve heard some “unpublished” parts of the story from the brewers.
Ranger was my everyday beer. I got off of it for a while, and didn’t notice it was gone. I saw Voodoo Ranger in the store, and thought it was something new. To me it tasted just like Ranger. Their Rampant IPA has a similar flavor that I can’t pinpoint, but I like it. I would call it unique, but both beers share it! 