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IPAs so murky they look like radioactive pond water, mocha-choco-vanilla Stouts, DDH (Double Dry Hopping for the uninitiated) fruit smoothies, and salty Goses that smell like a gym instructor’s sweat. Is craft beer trying too hard?
Not long ago, Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø, the owner of Evil Twin and one of the most prolific brewers in the world, expressed his unease on Facebook, writing:
I miss the good old days when we didn’t have to produce 5 new beers every week to keep our customers happy.
Maybe that’s a sign that we should all step off this hamster wheel for a moment and think about where our industry is heading.
There was a time, not so long ago, when a group of American brewers came together and committed to reclaiming beer from the big monopolies and brewing it with integrity and passion once more.
And it is largely thanks to these early pioneers of the craft beer movement that today we can sit at a bar and drink from a seemingly endless flood of outlandish beers from all over the world.
And that is the problem — because due to their flawless work in recreating different beer styles, brewers have inadvertently created a consumer culture in which beer no longer necessarily needs to be great. It just needs to be new.
As a craft brewery owner, I’ve lost count of the number of bars I’ve called to ask how sales are going, to find out whether our beer has sold through. Great, I sometimes say, and then ask if they’d like to order more:
No thanks, we won’t be buying the same beer again. Our customers get bored easily these days. Do you have anything new?
This insatiable need for something new is robbing craft breweries of the time they need to perfect their beers.
Because the truth is that most of the world’s best beers didn’t taste that way after the first batch.
Brewers would have spent months and years tweaking and adjusting — raising a fermentation temperature a degree here, shifting a hop addition a few minutes later in the boil, honing and perfecting their recipes.
That is what the craft of brewing is truly about.
But now that artisanal component is being compromised by the hashtag generation, with some craft breweries starting to buckle under the pressure.
For example, the practice of trialling a recipe by brewing small batches before moving to full production has been abandoned.
There’s simply no time to wait 4 weeks and see whether the beer actually works. Just roll the dice and hope for the best.
Whereas until recently it was perfectly fine to have a Pilsner, an APA, an IPA and a Stout in your portfolio — with the occasional seasonal release to add a little drama — these days it’s not unusual for a brewery to have multiple versions of the same style, many of them more or less identical because they’re essentially the same beer at heart.
Just throw in a bit more hops here and there and you’ve got two beers for the price of one. There’s simply no time to refine.
It’s irresponsible, it’s careless — but to some extent unavoidable, as brewers face mounting pressure to conjure up something different every week.
So who’s to blame? Is it the craft breweries themselves, managing their social media with Kardashian-level skill to announce their new releases — often in limited quantities to deliberately crank up the hype?
Is it apps like Untappd, which fuel the “more is better” consumer culture by rewarding users with shiny badges? Or the bars for happily feeding this habit?
Remember that it all began as a journey of discovery — so perhaps it’s not fair to criticize these drinkers for simply wanting to explore every option along the way.
Whoever is to blame for craft breweries increasingly feeling the pressure to keep up with their customers — and for being forced to choose, week after week, between brewing the best beer they can or simply brewing the easiest beer to sell — one thing is certain: sooner or later, it will come to a head.
Unless, perhaps, we can somehow hit pause, breathe in the aroma of the hops, and simply get back to enjoying the beer we love.
