New Trend in Beer: Disgruntlement About Beer
“Disgruntled man sitting at a bar with a glass of hazy IPA” generated by Midjourney. All photos in this post came from the same prompt.
Is May the season of our discontent, or is something in the air? Whatever it is, people seem to be tuning into the same wavelength. Stephen Beaumont kicked things off with a piece that took special aim at beer’s most recent superstar/bête noire, hazy IPA, leading to a roundtable discussion of all that is dismal:
Stephen Beaumont: “[F]or the first time in modern craft beer’s existence, brewers found themselves forced to produce beers of a style many of them didn’t particularly like. Quiet, off-the-record discussions with any number of North American brewers have revealed that many loathe the style and resent having to make it, sometimes even admitting to not being partial to their own version.”
Pete Brown: “One by-product of all this is that the sheer energy and joy that once characterised craft beer is no longer the spirit that defines it. It is still there, in tap rooms and at festivals, but it’s slightly jaded. The naïve sense of adventure seems to have gone. You could say the industry has matured. You could say it needed to. But it’s also in danger of losing what made it exciting in the first place.”
Drew Beechum: “Personally for me - I think the problem for craft beer is the same as "The Death of Rock and Roll". It used to be new, it used to be fun and in your face and a challenge…. It's no longer hip and interesting to go sit in an industrial-esque space with a row of taps and Tolix stools lit by string lights with reverby music played on a tinny sound system not sized for the space.”
Are things really very dismal, and if so, how dismal? Which things? Is this a widely-held view, or the view of elder gents who have been writing about beer too long? (Andy Crouch, used to being the curmudgeon in the room, might have surprised himself when he wrote an optimistic counterpoint.) Well, you know this elder gent has thoughts—and I think things are actually pretty good.
In no particular order, here are the things I think I think:
There is no craft beer. The biggest issue I have with the recent spate of discussion is conceptual: the category of craft beer, once useful in educating consumers who thought beer could only be fizzy and yellow, doesn’t exist anymore (if it ever did). The conversations are premised in varying degrees on expectations related to craft beer, but not beer beer. “Craft” has been around so long it seems solid and real, but whether you look at the beer, the brewery, or the owner, the meaning dissolves into vapor. Companies make and sell beer, respond to market realities, and have to balance introducing innovative products while responding to consumer trends. If we hold them to special expectations, I think we’re always going to be disappointed.
No segment of beer has ever been “pure.” One theme running through these pieces interrogates the idea that “craft beer” was once free of the petty concerns of commerce, and if brewers only made what they wanted to make customers would drink it. Now the marketing department makes them brew hazy IPA and they despair. Well, whatever “craft beer” may have been in the before times, it damn sure wasn’t pure. One of the pioneers, Boston Beer, was a contract-brewing marketing agency that sold “Boston Lager” brewed in Pittsburgh. As early as the 1980s, breweries were chasing sales by trying to brew hype beers, a phenomenon that got so bad it led to the first speed bump for small breweries in the mid-1990s. Breweries made beer they didn’t like or admire all the time! And this is far from new or a distinguishing feature of “craft beer.” This is how beer has functioned for a very long time—not years or decades, but centuries. The commerce/art push-pull has been around forever.
Maybe beer is still fun—and maybe is was never meant to be super fun. Beer never stopped being fun in the way it has always been fun—as a lightly alcoholic mood lightener. When I forget this, I recall memories of drinking in Bavarian pubs. Drinkers (and non-drinkers) aren’t drawn into their vast depths because they expect to find a hazy IPA with a new experimental hop on tap—they go because this is where life happens. Sitting with a liter of the same beer you’ve drunk a thousand times is pleasurable because of the place, the context, and the people. For a few years in the teens, certain kinds of beer became bizarrely hot property. People were willing to stand in a three-hour line for the privilege of buying cans of the stuff at draft prices. This is a perfect example of a fad—an inherently unstable situation. But by investing so much energy into the pursuit of these beers, people forgot where the actual, sustainable pleasure lay. At least some of the disgruntlement of the moment seems to be a hangover of that misplaced sense of fun. Combine that with outsized expectations for what beer should be, you’re left with grumbling. This is a wild idea, but instead of waiting three hours to buy a hazy IPA, maybe spend three hours with friends drinking it?
Innovation in beer styles will always end up in a gimmicky blind alley. Another thread in the discussion is whether to lay the blame for beer’s malaise at the feet of hazy IPAs (and by extension, I assume, other hype beers like dessert stouts and smoothie sours). Look, any time a new style emerges that excites people, it leads to excess. Brewers take the trend as far as they can, locating the point of “too far,” and scaling back. But that doesn’t mean the base style is bad. You can go back to porters and stouts to see this (I recently mention Mercer’s Meat Stout on Twitter), and of course it happened with pilsners as well. “Craft beer,” as always, is not special. Hazy IPAs are one almost inevitable manifestation of a country that grows hops as expressive as ours. There are bad examples, for sure, and when breweries made them thick and sweet as milkshakes, they’d gone too far, but there’s a reason they became a fad in the first place. They’re really tasty. I detect a slight irony in this commentary as well. On the one hand, some people slag hazies as abominations made for people who don’t like beer, and on the other hand they complain about falling beer sales. Hazies are a bona fide style and they’re with us for good. They are not the cause of beer’s woes, such that they exist, which bring me to…
Beer is good and interesting and fun to drink. Beer waxes and wanes in popularity and innovation. The explosion of pale lagers in the 19th century was one of the most significant moments in brewing history. Ultimately it begat interchangeable industrial lagers with multimillion-dollar ad campaigns. This is the cycle of things. I have been drinking beer for nearly forty years and I can confirm that today we enjoy a a higher standard of quality, better drinking culture, and more interesting breweries than ever. And if you compare 2024 not to 1990, but 1970, I mean…
Innovation should come to the pub rather than the glass. Finally, a slightly off-topic observation. I recently met Marcus Archambeault at Holman’s, a Portland dive bar. Marcus and his partner Warren Boothby have been acquiring and restoring distressed dive bars for the past decade. On the weekday afternoon we chatted, the place was about half full, and the pool table was occupied by a group of young people. It would fill up over the next couple hours. It does that every day, attracting a young clientele, and keeping them occupied until 2:30 am. (Six of eight taps were local craft, and the last two were Guinness and Rainier.) The breweries I visit, by contrast, are often half-full at dinner time and close at 9 pm. This gets back to point number three: the location of beer’s fun is in the place, context, and people. Drew mentioned it’s no longer hip to sit on metal stools looking at a cinder block wall in an industrial taproom—but it’s also not particularly fun, either. No offense to under-capitalized breweries who are forced to locate their breweries in these places, but that vibe is very much a bug and not a feature. Dive bars, moody cocktail bars, those wonderful Bavarian bier halls—those are fun places people go to hang out and drink. Breweries have made enormous strides in improving the quality of their beer; going forward, I would love to see more innovation in the drinking experience.
In conclusion, I’m not sure we need to get too worried about the state of beer or the evils of hazy IPA right now—I align with Andy Crouch on that one. I am not at all disgruntled about beer, either—quite the contrary, I take joy in the thought of the clouds clearing and the pub patios I will soon visit. I am looking forward to inviting friends to join me at these places, take my wonderful new drinking partner along with me, and make like a Bavarian with a liter of beer. (Maybe hazy IPA!) There has never been a better time.