Is Beer Less Interesting, Or Am I?

Last week Evan Rail posted slightly wistful reflections at Good Beer Hunting on the changing nature of beer: “That shift in reading and writing mirrors a larger change in brewing and drinking… But when you multiply that by more than 8,000 new breweries that have appeared in the U.S. since the year 2007, you start to grasp that neither a new brewery nor an article that announces its arrival is going to be interesting in and of itself.”

This post is going to be very old-school bloggy in that I’m just thinking out loud. It will be as disposable as a tweet, but perhaps spark a more durable dialogue. I relate strongly to the idea that it’s harder to find anything new in beer, and that so much seems repetitious. (Let’s not get into the way beer media now seems to be infected with listicles, poor explainers, or pieces with titles like, “The Best ______ According to These Experts.”) Evan takes the point of view of a writer who has been covering beer for a quarter century, and as a fellow old I identify with it. But as an old I often find myself coming up short and asking: is the beer world really less interesting, or am I?

I look back on my teen years, as I was just getting into music, with some embarrassment. I liked a lot of schlocky hits on the radio that were the equivalent of the latest flavored-malt beverage: they were uncomplicated, very trendy, engineered to attract the largest audience, and as a consequence of all that, had a very short shelf life. But I thought some of the songs I heard were so cool. When you discover some new field, whether it be music or beer, you bring to it what Zen Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” It’s the capacity not to let knowledge jade momentary experience. We don’t know something is “bad” yet because our pool of information is too small to identify the hackneyed or cliche.

Put this another way: does the wonder lie in the object or the observer? Was beer really more novel and interesting X years ago (pick your time frame)? Do we greet a new brewery opening with disinterest because it really does lack interest, or because we’ve lost our own sense of wonder?

These are not binary positions, of course. At any given time, there are good and bad breweries. Good and bad trends really do develop that can fill us with excitement or exhaustion. Boring breweries opened in 1994 and exciting breweries are opening this year. Yet we are not unchanging, objective observers in all of this, able to extricate our experience from the world’s churn. As someone who has been around awhile, I am constantly vigilant about becoming an advertisement for “old man waves fist at cloud.” Being able to find wonder in the world is something I want to embrace, not reject. No one, on the other hand, wants to be a rube. We need to maintain a sense of discernment about the things that really aren’t good.

Anyway, in the fashion of the old blogosphere, I throw it out to you. How do you maintain this balance as the world unfolds around you?