Shhh, don't say it too loud they'll all want one. I mean seriously why do you care about the amount of respect that beer gets? Go to Belgium you'll find plenty of respect there, at reasonable prices as well. Look at the US, some of the best beer in the world at very affordable prices. The wine scene is overloaded with obfuscating, self-agrandising opinion (search YouTube for "Posh Nosh" and listen to Richard E. Grant's excellent satire of wine appreciation), if beer can avoid this tendency then so much the better.
Well, i lament the lack of good beer available when i go to a restaurant, the lack of knowledge about beer in general and wish it were different.
In belgium, the biggest selling beer is a pale lager that the poms refer to as wife beater. They used to respect beer and have largely stopped doing so.
Besides, we aren't talking about a market where beer is already respected, we are talking about a market where beer is for drinking in the hot weather, the most popular beer is VB, the biggest growing brands are low carbohydrate lagers and midstrength travesties.... I thought that as beer lovers we collectively didn't like this and wanted it to change?
The beer market in australia and all the other mature beer markets is in decline, the thing that it is taking that market away, is wine... You want to compete with wine, you need to maybe look at what wine does well that beer does badly. And guess what? Its partly to do with all the obfuscating and self agrandisement. Wine is very very good at telling all and sundy that it is special and making them believe it. Beer tends to suck at it, and when someone tries... They get **** canned by the people who should be applaudng.
Making expensive "super premium" style beers isn't the only way make beer special, you can drive it form the bottom up by convincing people that even normal beer is special too, look at the way Camra has handled it in the UK - but if you want wanky beer speak to rival anything that the wine world has to offer, you dont have to look much further than camra. But winning places at the high end table is important too if beer supposed to hold its own against wine in the overall booze market.
$25 stubbies in fancy bottles might not be your idea of what beer should be, but then again, for the vast majority of Australians (and the rest of the world too) neither is an IPA, a Pale Ale or an Imperial Stout of any description. For most of them, they feel the same way about a $25 six pack of craft beer, that some people seem to feel about a $25 stubbie.
