Homebrewers and microbrewers like to believe that they are part of a brotherhood, or club. But they shit all over each other. What kind of brotherhood is that?
I wouldn’t dismiss IPAs as a fad, as they are both well-established historically and have a compelling character, but I do think there are trends and fads within the small boutique brewing world. See for instance the upswing in belgian-style unfiltered ales a few years ago. They’d always been around and always had their fans, but for a little while there it was almost hard to put your hands on a craft beer and not have it be a belgian.
I think a lot of it simply boils down to exposure. In my town in the early 2000s, beers like Sam Adams and Anchor were high-end and kind of exotic. There were exactly two stores that solid anything not produced by a major distributor.
You can’t have demand for a product if you don’t even know it exists. As consumers were exposed to new styles of beer, the niche for local microbreweries was carved out of a place where it hadn’t even existed previously.
Another factor is local pride. People like drinking local beers. They like supporting local businesses and they like identifying with a particular brewery in the same way one might identify with a local team. We have several microbreweries now, and lots of people will say that this one or that one is ‘their’ brewery.
Definitely not a fad, but I’ve known people who have somehow come to the conclusion that hoppiness is the defining characteristic in what makes a beer - any beer - good. When I was younger I might’ve argued with them about it, but nowadays I’m more than happy to let people drink what they like. There is so much good beer out there! It’s a golden (l)age(r) no matter what you prefer.
Maybe you just know a bunch of really shitty people?
There are beer snobs and beer nerds. Most homebrewers and microbrewers I know are the latter, and may god bless the nerd in all its myriad forms.
If you think about it, the micro brewery is simply a return to the traditional way of making and consuming beer. A person in a village who’s good at it would make their living by brewing beer and selling it, putting out the “ale stake” at the door to signal they had a batch ready to go. Since old school beer doesn’t travel well and doesn’t keep all that long and nobody had bottles and caps yet this was a very practical arrangement for everyone. Then in America we decided that making giant job lots of pasteurized standardized shit beer was the Way To Go and we did that while the small breweries died out. Prohibition had a lot to do with that too. Then someone figured out that maybe small batch beer that can be tweaked and didn’t have to travel half a continent before it was consumed might actually go over well with their neighbors and the ale stake made its triumphant return.
Here in Oregon if you sell alcohol you’re required to sell food as well so this has resulted in some absolutely outstanding beer and food venues. I’ve still yet to try the micro brewery down the street that also does Detroit style pizza, might could be I should do a pickup order with a growler sometime soon.
And yes, IPAs are The Suck and fools who go gaga over them are silly. I consider it a waste of good hops but there you go.
Eveywhere I go.
Are we even still in a boom? I had to look at the OP date to make sure I didn’t open up a thread from 2005. I’m not trying to be snarky, but for me (Chicago area and traveling around), the peak felt like the early 2010s to me. Now it’s just normal. We’ve had a cider boom since then, ryes became hip again (pretty much coinciding with the craft beer boom), there was some toe-dipping into meads that didn’t seem to take, and IPAs have been supplanted by sours as the style du jour, although that feels to already be fading.
From my perspective as a beer drinker. It was like this: in the 80s and early 90s most of us were only exposed to macro beers. A lot of us drank them, but weren’t particularly enthralled by them. As Sam Adams became popular nationwide (and other breweries like Pete’s Wicked and I’d like to say I saw Sierra Nevada around here, but I don’t remember seeing them until the 00s) our tastes for beer expanded and desire to try out different styles increased. By the mid-90s, here, I started to find bars that would have dozens of beers on tap, and up to like a hundred different international beers in bottles.
Palates expanded, people interested in beer became exposed to different styles and flavors, and local brewers capitalized on that. Beer was no longer defined by the macrolager style. Add to that the whole “buy local” stuff that spread through the 20- and 30-somethings of the time, and relatively easy access to equipment and knowledge, and it’s not surprise, to me, to find local microbreweries pop up everywhere.
Just my observation, not any deeply thought-out thesis.
We live in Bozeman now (Boozeman?), and there are 13 brewpubs, at least 2 distilleries, a cider-house and a meadery. They range the gamut to my palate. As far as IPA’s, I’m now a NEPA guy, but I started back in the day with mass-market lagers. I was in college in '88 when someone handed me my first Sierra Nevada (I might have had hallucinogens in the system), and my mind was blown. That bitter, clean flavor was something else. Not so much now, but that was an epochal change right about then.
Could the internet be a big part of the explanation? Beer is a hugely popular topic on social media. Perhaps social media has helped create demand for additional variety in beer.
Distilleries are the new brewpub around here. All beer tastes like soap to me, so I am super excited to have a hipster place where they make the stuff I like, instead. Too many breweries only had beer licenses, and maybe wine.
I was under the impression that a lot of laws shifted in the 90s in ways that made small brewpubs more feasible. It’s also possible that a certain critical mass of interest was needed in order to bring the price of equipment of the right size down. I suspect that 20 years ago much of the brewing equipment available was too big or too small and you either had to improvise or custom order.
I think I’m beginning to see a correlation here.
1979, in fact, when Jimmy Carter de-regulated the beer industry, making small breweries more feasible once again.
Genius. There ain’t no condescending snob like a beer snob. And the funny part, it’s just fucking beer.
That was it! Then a slow burn of development and finally an explosion. We are now finally reach ing a mature industry.
Yeah, here, too. Started maybe about a dozen years ago with the distilleries. I just wish they would play around a little bit more – I mostly see vodkas (not something I drink, and how many vodkas do you need) and whiskey (which there’s so many exemplary examples of all around the world, what’s the chances you’ve got a great one, given how much time can be involved for aging.) I wish I would see more local schnapps/eau-de-vie type distillates with regional fruits and that sort of thing, but I don’t think Americans have the taste yet for that style of hard alcohol, though I think they can be trained. (After all, IPAs and sours – a style I never thought would catch on here – are both strongly flavored love-it-or-hate-it styles that have become key in the brewing industry.)
This. I’m in the Midwest, too. The IPA craze does seem to be dying down slightly here (or so I hope) but there’s always people who aim to claim they enjoy the really bitter IPAs, and they are often related to the people who insist they enjoy the hottest chili foods. Hooray for them but it’s not a contest.
OK, so here’s the thing. Why? If you don’t like them, you don’t buy them, right? Then everything is OK in the universe, right?
I mean sure, there’s some beer snob waiting to shit on whatever beer you DID buy…
True. The issue is that, for years, they’ve been the primary offering from many of the microbreweries here, and it’s been the beer type that they have focused their efforts on. If you want an IPA, there’s dozens and dozens; if you want something else, your selection is often much narrower. I enjoy trying and discovering new beers, but the range of beers at my liquor store which I am willing to even try is limited, because so many of the microbrew offerings are IPAs.
A few months ago, I was at Binny’s (a Chicago liquor store chain, with a very large selection of beers). They had a representative from one of the area’s bigger microbreweries doing tastings of a bunch of their newer offerings; I think he had six or seven different varieties available.
He asked me if I’d like to try a few, I said, “Sure!” But, then, I saw the labels on some of the cans, and said, “But, I’m not a fan of IPAs.” He looked crestfallen – everything he had was an IPA. I tried a couple of the ones which he swore “weren’t too bitter,” but that was clearly “not too bitter relative to the stupidly-hoppy current standard for IPAs,” and I didn’t like either of them at all.
I LOVE IPAs (and I love really hot foods, and, no I don’t think it’s a contest, those are part of my tastes) BUT we have more IPAs already than I can ever drink in a lifetime. I already have my favorites – it’s unlikely I’m ever going to regularly buy any new type I come across.
The problem is that every-fucking-body is making IPAs. I thought the IPA craze was dying ten years ago, but it still seems to be going strong, though we’ve had sours taking up some of the taps now, too.
I would be happy for IPAs to slow down and breweries concentrate more on other styles to balance out the varieties available on store shelves. And it makes no sense to me. I would think with the supersaturated market in IPAs, wouldn’t you, as a brewery, try to distinguish yourself from your peers by specializing in some other style?
OK man, but seriously, at Binny’s you can get anything you want.