The Many and Varied Interests Remaining in Beer
Midjourney. Prompt: “craft beer has very few stories left to tell, ukiyo-e style”
One of the regular commenters on this blog, small-d david, recently castigated me for my “relentless pursuit” of the Bud Light story. (I have returned to the story perhaps excessively, I plead guilty, but still only three times.) He added:
“Craft beer has very few stories left to tell.”
By coincidence, Boak and Bailey recently went to a similar place in their monthly Substack:
“What's the last new thing that happened in beer in the past five years?” was the challenge we got from Norwegian beer writer Lars Marius Garshol when we discussed this in a pub in Bristol last week.
The only thing that came to mind was the much-derided glitter beer from 2018.
Beer isn’t Dead
Man, do I have thoughts. So very many. I’ve been writing about beer since 1997. I’ve been a columnist for three newspapers and magazines. I’ve written thousands of posts on this blog since it launched in 2006. And I’ve been freelancing full-time, writing almost exclusively about beer, since 2010. For a very good part of that time, I worried that david’s point was true. (I don’t really relate to “craft beer,” but the point is as applicable to beer as to its American small-brewery subset.) How many times can you write, “Hey everybody, look at this new IPA!!”? At what point have you said all that can be said? I’ve woken to more than a few Mondays with no ideas, no plans, and a blank page waiting on the computer. For years it really freaked me out.
Yet week after week, month after month, year after year, interesting stuff kept cropping up. If I stop to think about something I don’t know, I can go down a rabbit hole that will lead me to learn something new about the seemingly infinite fascinating details beer contains. If I scan the news, I’ll usually find something at least blog-worthy happening in the world of beer. (Of those thousands of blog posts, a few may have been duds.) And, if I’m having trouble coming up with an idea, I dig a little deeper, focusing my attention on the various vast domains within beer:
Brewing itself. Contra Boak and Bailey, there’s always a lot going on in the brewhouse.
Breweries. Some are opening, some are closing. What do these passages tell us, and what are new breweries offering? Not every brewery is alike and, despite our cynicism about the “great man” deep dives, breweries new and old are still among the most interesting subjects.
History. I’m no historian, but even a general writer has many opportunities to connect this moment to distant events, technologies, developments, styles, and trends buried in our past.
Culture. This is one of the most dynamic elements of beer. Who is making the beer? What are they making? How is it changing? Who is drinking the beer? Where are they drinking it? What is happening in different regions?
The beer biz. I do think writers spend too much time focusing on quarterly reports. While that is incredibly interesting/important to people inside the industry, it gets old for those outside. But still, lots of stuff to discuss, and some of the biggest stories come from the business side of things.
Science and agriculture. So much of what appears in our glass is inflected by ingredients, chemistry, and technology. I mean, I still don’t really know what the hell a thiol is.
I also spend a fair amount of time absorbing what’s happening in the world and thinking, and many times this leads to interesting meditations. These aren’t the kinds of things you find in beer mags, but they’re perfect for blogs.
Some recent examples of the interesting stuff I’ve written and read demonstrate the point. From my side, a great example is the USDA’s collection of hop plants researchers have preserved. It’s been there for decades, 90 minutes from my house, but I didn’t know it existed until 2023. It took the discovery of a possibly-native Maryland hop (another something new!) to kick off that investigation.
Last week, Martyn Cornell took Anchor’s closure (now there was a story), and used it as an excuse to dig into the history of steam beer (which spiraled out into quite a tale). In the new beer zine Final Gravity, Lady Justice’s Betsy Lay wrote a moving and intimate story about her friend Aimee Soete, a brewer who died of cancer. Ruvani de Silva and Lindsay Malu Kido recently did a long piece considering the Brewers Association’s responsibility to the industry it represents. And Matthew Curtis recently set the beer world on fire by arguing that terroir has bo place in beer. Just this year alone, two beer writers picked up James Beard awards for their work.
I am currently working on a piece about advanced hop products. No doubt many purists—possibly david among them—will lament this development, which seems to be taking us back into the very kind of food-science beer-making that sparked craft beer in the first place. But the development of these additives is in the process of remaking beer. It’s a massive story. Beer is the story of technological change, and we’re sitting in the middle of one of the most interesting examples in decades. This week I’ll write about a brilliant IPA brewer in Oklahoma City—who also happens to lead the Iowa Nation. I was recently invited to submit a piece tweezing the hazy IPA style away from all the marketing gloss, which could nicely balance my investigations into the current state of West Coast IPAs.
Beer never sleeps. It is a product of a cultural conversation that has been going on for thousands of years. The London I visited in 2011 had a handful of breweries. Eight years later it had over a hundred. Brussels is changing, and so is Belgian beer. A decade ago I had no idea that farmhouse brewers in Norway fired their kettles over open fires and pitched a strange, multi-strain yeast that would soon be available at yeast labs around the world. Last year I went and saw them brew.
In short, there remain, frustratingly, many things about beer I still don’t know—which is why I’m certain beer is not dead.
Why Does Beer Feel Dead?
I think there’s a reason people are asking these questions now. I had the strange fortune to begin writing about beer in the late 1990s, just after a very exciting period had ended. Like today, I wrote about closures, fire sales and acquisitions, and flat sales. This new microbrewing thing had been fun, people said, but it was time to move on. Small breweries, like the goatee, were passe.
I think what’s happening now is what Buddhists call “the suffering of change.” For a good decade, beer was incredibly exciting. Breweries opened like crazy, new styles were reshaping the landscape, and everyone was getting into good beer. For a decade, craft beer was the fun party and everyone wanted to be there. For those of us who got used to that mode of being—or who didn’t know anything else—2023 has the feel of the hangover after the party. We have vague regrets and our moods are dark. A world in which beer isn’t the coolest party in town must be a boring one in which nothing is happening. Time to move on.
Actually, that’s a mirage, too. This cycle is an ancient one, and, to bring another Buddhist concept into the mix, it won’t last. All trends are temporary, and in the coming year or three (or, honestly, maybe five), things will change again. Something new will happen, as it always does, eventually, and a new generation will discover beer and we’ll be back off to the races.
In the meantime, beer is still an incredibly rich subject. Even when sales are down, we can find pleasure and joy in its many varied dimensions—and in a simple pint. So Boak, Bailey, and david, stay tuned and prepare to be entertained. In the coming months and years, we’ll continue to explore this infinite world and make many fun discoveries together.