Craft brewing backlash?

[fraser_john]

Doctors Orders even cops a mention(a whack?).

http://www.goodfood.com.au/good-food/drink/has-the-craft-beer-machine-reached-saturation-point-20150220-13k0mo.html

Personally, I don't know who pays those kind of prices, most people I hang out with brew or like my beers so buying is not much of an option!

 

[Liam_snorkel]

not a very well written article. meh. misses the mark of a few levels.

 

[danestead]

Meh, that guy is probably a Carlton dry kinda guy at heart anyway. You don't have to analyse every beer you drink, you can just drink about it and not think much other than this beer is nice, it has flavour.

 

[stux]

Two things about the article, his basic points are that Craft Beer is too expensive, and the Triple Double Imperial IPAs and Seawead Decoction Porterweizen are too 'funny'.

The first thing is basically due to taxation issues. High alcohol beers are simply taxed too much.

And secondly, if you don't like strange craft beers, then drink the vanilla ones. This should get fixed through competition, and there are plenty of 'smashable' craft beers... Don't drink a Hopinator Miracle 9000 if you want a session beer.

Its about choice, and we are infinitely better off than we were x years ago, but we are also far behind where the US is now. The only difference between our scene and the US scene is a few years, and some of the most heavy hitting excise laws in the beer world.

 

[Airgead]

Actually.... he makes some good points -

Sometimes you don't want a flavoursome beer and I see people returning to those more smashable lagers as well. Maybe brewers in Australia need to be paying more attention to the climate and temperature that we have and brewing a little bit closer to that."
"I think it's harder to make something with subtlety and balance than what it is to just empty the hop cupboard," says McMahon.

A large percentage of the craft beers out are are APA or IPA type, big, hoppy ales. We are going the US route of bigger=better which is just plain wrong. We have lost balance.

I'd love to be able to drink some really good, locally made, craft lagers or sessionable ales, but they are hard to find (outside of my serving fridge anyway). Its all IPA all the way. If I'm out with mates I want something I can down a few of without feeling like I've sucked on the hop bag or gettign that overly sweet thing you get with big beers.

Actually 4 pines Koelch is pretty good. Its my go to when I'm out for a night. But other than that, I'm struggling to think of something my usual haunts have that is sessionable.

Cheers
Dave

 

[Mardoo]

Or how about a kickass local hefe? Or schwarzbier? Both feckin' excellent on a warm, humid day like today. With an outdoor pool table.

 

[Airgead]

My keg of Heffe is calling to me now. Only 15 minutes till knock off time.

But yes. Sessionable styles. Lagers, Heffes, Sessionable ales...

 

[Bribie G]

With two threads in the latest posts:

False bottom Gap
Craft Brewing Backlash

not to mention "Burn me Nose"

I wonder if I've stumbled into a BDSM site. Hmm, yesssssss

 

[Bribie G]

I agree about sessionable and easy drinking beers. The problem is that whilst these have existed in the past, the Megaswill factories have blanded and blanded and blanded their beers till they mostly taste like carbonated cats piss.

With the benefit of old fartdom, I can report that back in the 70s, Fosters and XXXX really held their heads up against German and Danish Pils style lagers. Fosters in particular was a full bodied quite aromatic beer, as were XXXX heavy and Carlton Draught. When I lived in Cardiff, Wales, you could get Aussie beers easily due to the large Australian population who went to the UK to work, or who were dodging the draft for the Vietnamese war. So I had access to a heap of beers such as Cascade, Reschs, Swan etc, having never been to Australia and judging the beers strictly in comparison to the local beers and Euro imports. Mind none of them got even close to Pilsner Urquell, but they scrubbed up quite nicely.

I think I posted here about four years ago when CUB did a release of Bulimba to maintain the copyright. The brewers at Yatala dusted off the old recipes and did a really good job of recreating Bulimba (which became Carlton Draught in QLD) using modern ingredients. It was a really nice drop and I did a side by side with a stubbie of modern CD. It was like comparing a Coffee Club flat white with a Nescafe blend 43.

The commercials could do a lot better with their current brands but heck why should they bother when their main audience is "ozzie ozzie ozzie oy oy oy " drinkers.

 

[Dave70]

Did you see the brewing giant's recent Super Bowl commercial? It's really quite a great piece of marketing. "Bud" proudly asserts itself as a macro brewery while taking the mickey out of stout-sniffing, moustache-fiddling, chambray-wearing beer boffins. "Budweiser is brewed for drinking not dissecting," we're told.

**** yeah! I'm with 'Bud"
Dumming **** down is what drives excellence!
Now pass the rice syrup..

 

[madpierre06]

It was a really nice drop and I did a side by side with a stubbie of modern CD. It was like comparing a Coffee Club flat white with a Nescafe blend 43.

The commercials could do a lot better with their current brands but heck why should they bother when their main audience is "ozzie ozzie ozzie oy oy oy " drinkers.

Comparing C.Club flat white to a blend 43 is like comparing CD to Swan Lite...stale cat's piss to really old stale cat's piss. Have a nice fresh roasted single origin and you will see what I mean.

And don't get me started on those bloody "oi oi oi" imbeciles.

 

[verysupple]

I think Bennie (the wine writer) got something right.

"It has led to just about any venue, anywhere in Australia, thinking that a craft beer list is compulsory and often misunderstanding what the category is and presenting a range of beers that don't represent what craft beer really should be."

I'm all for being able to go to a restaurant/cafe or whatever and being able to choose something other than an Aussie or Asian mainstream lager. But quite often if a place has craft beers the list has a bunch of hoppy pale ales and maybe an IPA.

Now, the owners/managers probably know very little about beer and just buy what they know will sell. You can't blame them for that. To me the problem seems to be consumer trends / idea of what craft beer is. We know there's more to the beer world than bland mainstream lagers and hoppy pales, but we probably know a lot more about the diversity of styles than the vast majority of consumers.

I think for the craft beer sector to grow (or at least not shrink) the average consumer needs to have access to a wide range of styles - from session beers to in your face palate wreckers. I'm sure a lot of us have "moods" when it comes to what they feel like drinking. Sometimes I want a malty, subtly hopped brown ale and sometimes an IIPA. But if you're only experience of craft beer is hoppy pale ales and IPAs, and you don't like hoppy beers, you're probably going to go back to mainstream lagers.

 

[Liam_snorkel]

Yeah, there definitely are some small breweries who exist purely on the fadism of "craft", need a good recession to sort the wheat from the chaff.

 

[TimT]

"It has led to just about any venue, anywhere in Australia, thinking that a craft beer list is compulsory and often misunderstanding what the category is and presenting a range of beers that don't represent what craft beer really should be."

My local quasi-Mexican quasi-restaurant at the supermarket says they have "A range of local beers". Apparently "local", in this case, means Corona or the other craptacular quasi-Cervezas you can get at Taco Bell. Not interested in having any of them.

 

[TimT]

Sometimes you don't want a flavoursome beer and I see people returning to those more smashable lagers as well. Maybe brewers in Australia need to be paying more attention to the climate and temperature that we have and brewing a little bit closer to that."

There's truth in this but it's less of an issue than it used to be. Historically Aussie brewers had great problems with climate and local yeasts, infections, etc - "Wild yeast is the scourge of the country" was a line from a 19th century poem about the subject. Perhaps early methods of temp control were one reason CUB was able to corner much of the beer market. But now no professional brewer would be without reasonable temperature control so most styles can be brewed all year round.

Now, many beers *are* season appropriate. But I think we have a lot of weird assumptions about this; for instance, who decided that porters and stouts are only good for the colder months?

In a sense IPAs and other big-hop beers could be excellent cold season brews - spicy foods are great in winter and the same is true with drinks.

 

[going down a hill]

**** yeah! I'm with 'Bud"
Dumming **** down is what drives excellence!
Now pass the rice syrup..

While at the same time they are buying any big craft brewery in the US that will sell.

 

[stux]

I agree about sessionable and easy drinking beers. The problem is that whilst these have existed in the past, the Megaswill factories have blanded and blanded and blanded their beers till they mostly taste like carbonated cats piss.

With the benefit of old fartdom, I can report that back in the 70s, Fosters and XXXX really held their heads up against German and Danish Pils style lagers. Fosters in particular was a full bodied quite aromatic beer, as were XXXX heavy and Carlton Draught. When I lived in Cardiff, Wales, you could get Aussie beers easily due to the large Australian population who went to the UK to work, or who were dodging the draft for the Vietnamese war. So I had access to a heap of beers such as Cascade, Reschs, Swan etc, having never been to Australia and judging the beers strictly in comparison to the local beers and Euro imports. Mind none of them got even close to Pilsner Urquell, but they scrubbed up quite nicely.

I think I posted here about four years ago when CUB did a release of Bulimba to maintain the copyright. The brewers at Yatala dusted off the old recipes and did a really good job of recreating Bulimba (which became Carlton Draught in QLD) using modern ingredients. It was a really nice drop and I did a side by side with a stubbie of modern CD. It was like comparing a Coffee Club flat white with a Nescafe blend 43.

The commercials could do a lot better with their current brands but heck why should they bother when their main audience is "ozzie ozzie ozzie oy oy oy " drinkers.

A few years ago, VB released a "VB Original Ale" or some such. I quite liked it.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Business/VB-goes-retro-to-quench-an-Original-hardearned-thirst/2005/04/27/1114462099987.html?from=moreStories

In a way, I wish the macro brewers would do this more often. Forget a Craft label, and do their big beers, in retro crafty versions. Maybe 2005 the world country wasn't ready for VB Original Ale... perhaps it is now.

 

[TimT]

No chance so-called "craft" beer is going to go away. No chance. People are more alert to the choices on offer now than ever before and more suspicious than ever before of the CUB attempts to offer so-called "choice". In the space of a year our brew club went from non-existent to having 50 members - that's in a city where there's already several active brew clubs already. These members weren't just coincidence.

The Bud ad in a way acknowledged this phenomenon. They wouldn't bother attacking something they didn't think mattered. On that note:

Finally, how ridiculous was that anti-craft beer Super Bowl ?
It was great for craft beer. It shows how confused and conflicted the world's biggest brewery is about how to engage an American populous whose beer tastes are changing. The more they spite us for trying beer outside of the light lager juggernaut, the more we're going to stand for something very separate from what they're about. Then as they buy out the companies making the beers they're making fun of, the hypocrisy is very apparent.

 

[manticle]

Myself, I think the term craft beer is responsible for a lot of any kind of backlash that may exist.*

Beer has been around for a really long time and before the us did it, before we copied them, beer was made. Some is mass produced, boring and bland but some is wonderfully flavourful with differences and nuances and niches aplenty. Is an altbier a craft beer or just a beer? How about a porter or a kolsch?
**** the dumb terms - there's beer and within that there are many different types. Some are well made, some aren't. Buy the well made ones that suit your drinking habits and if you want to support small/local/independent, buy from independently owned micros.
For me, I'll buy it if I want it and it suits my palate that day so it can be mega (little creatures, hoegaarden) or minor/micro (temple, 4 pines). Craft schmaft- just be beer and be good.

I don't care about trends or backlashes. I drank duvel when I was 18, long before our craft revolution, and I'll be brewing my version of it long after it's over.

Oh the article? Maybe right maybe wrong, don't give a ****. Marketing is the devil's puckered freckle held over your face till you poke your tongue out.

*Worth pointing out that backlash is also unimportant if you don't care about trends. Good beer will survive, trends by definition taper off. Backlash is mostly marketing. The term craft beer still sucks meaningless jobbies though.

Also 'responsible' is a big call. Just a **** meaningless term then. I liked the joke about decoupage.

Oud bruin, helles, geuze, gose, schwarzbier - craft or not?

 

[stux]

I think Bennie (the wine writer) got something right.


I'm all for being able to go to a restaurant/cafe or whatever and being able to choose something other than an Aussie or Asian mainstream lager. But quite often if a place has craft beers the list has a bunch of hoppy pale ales and maybe an IPA.

Now, the owners/managers probably know very little about beer and just buy what they know will sell. You can't blame them for that. To me the problem seems to be consumer trends / idea of what craft beer is. We know there's more to the beer world than bland mainstream lagers and hoppy pales, but we probably know a lot more about the diversity of styles than the vast majority of consumers.

I think for the craft beer sector to grow (or at least not shrink) the average consumer needs to have access to a wide range of styles - from session beers to in your face palate wreckers. I'm sure a lot of us have "moods" when it comes to what they feel like drinking. Sometimes I want a malty, subtly hopped brown ale and sometimes an IIPA. But if you're only experience of craft beer is hoppy pale ales and IPAs, and you don't like hoppy beers, you're probably going to go back to mainstream lagers.

The thing is, IPAs are what you get because IPAs are what is selling, if consumers wanted craft beers which were session beers, then that is what would be made and sold...

There are sessionable craft beers, and they do sell.

There are a lot of craft breweries, and the mega craft brews are quite sessionable, and do sell

Fat Yak, Lashes etc

Just don't drink a Hopinator if you don't want to be hop socked, and if competition is working, then you will get what the general craft drinking public wants...

Tap contracts might be hurting competition though.

 

[stux]

Myself, I think the term craft beer is responsible for a lot of any ki d of backlash that may exist.

Beer has been around for a really long time and before the us did it, before we copied them, beer was made. Some is mass produced, boring and bland but sone is wonderfully flavourful with differences and nuances and niches aplenty. Is an altbier a craft beer or just a beer? How about a porter or a kolsch?
**** the dumb terms - there's beer and within that there are many different types. Some are well made, some aren't. Buy the well made ones that suit your drinking habits and if you want to support smalk/local/independent, buy from independently owned micros.
For me, I'll buy it if I want it and it suits my palate that day so it can be mega (little creatures, hoegaarden) or minor/micro (temple, 4 pines). Craft schmaft- just be beer and be good.

I don't care about trends or backlashes. I drank duvel when I was 18, long before our craft revolution, and I'll be brewing my version of it long after it's over.

Oh the article? Maybe right maybe wrong, don't give a ****. Marketing is the devil's puckered freckle held over your face till you poke your tongue out.

In Belgium, at least when I was living there, the term Artisanal was used where we would use "craft" now...

And Duvel-Moortgat, counted

BTW, I had a Duvel Triple Hopped 2015 Edition (Mosaic), delicious

 

[TimT]

In Belgium, at least when I was living there, the term Artisanal was used where we would use "craft" now...

And Duvel-Moortgat, counted

BTW, I had a Duvel Triple Hopped 2015 Edition (Mosaic), delicious

In Belgium, at least when I was living there, the term Artisanal was used where we would use "craft" now...

And Duvel-Moortgat, counted

BTW, I had a Duvel Triple Hopped 2015 Edition (Mosaic), delicious

Well speaking personally, this is an artisanal craft homebrewed forum comment, cured and cultured with a heirloom yoghurt, and fermented at ambient temperatures by flaxen-haired maidens for a fair-trade wage.... but I don't know about some of the other, mass produced comments above.

 

[going down a hill]

You forgot bespoke

 

[manticle]

He's on holiday.
In Belgium.
Drinking beer.
Good beer.

 

[Dave70]

Yeah, there definitely are some small breweries who exist purely on the fadism of "craft", need a good recession to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Some brewers mash chaff?

 

[Rambo]

Couldn't be good beer surely? I've just returned from Belgium and didn't see a craft beer advertised anywhere.

 

[MartinOC]

Thanks for posting the Busweiser ad., TimT. I wouldn't have gone looking for it to watch otherwise.

What I got from it was "Don't think for yourself, just drink what we market to you". Appealing to the lowest common denominator in the drinking-public (much the same way that Labor appeals to the lowest common denominator in the voting public by campaigning on a Public Holiday for the "Grate" Final weekend, FFS!!!

Therein lies a fundamental problem. The Marketing (not the quality of product) is what drives Anheuser-Busch & the "biggies" over here. They have BIG pockets to do the marketing, which the little guys don't have.

You also brought-up the point "They wouldn't bother attacking something they didn't think mattered". Yep! That's why they went after Buweiser Budvar many years ago in an attempt to shut them up (& won, only because they had the $'s to pay for a huge legal team). Anyone remember the argument over who was first & the semantic difference between the slogans "The King of beers" vs "The beer of Kings" & who stole it from whom? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser_trademark_dispute

Over here, we have the "Big-boys" who have their marketing clout, but we, the discerning drinking public choose not to consume it, because we can think (& drink!) for ourselves.

I originally started homebrewing in the UK because I wanted to replicate the stuff I got in local pubs, made by artisans & served by publicans who cared about the product they were selling. When I came to Aus., I started brewing again because I was bitterly (pardon the obvious pun!) disappointed with the quality & choice afforded by what was available from the mainstream breweries.

In the past few years, the choice has got much better & I can only think that's a good thing for discerning consumers. The big boys are scared of the competition. I can't see Australians capitulating to accept mainstream **** in their glass ever again.

Craft beer is here to stay! :super:

 

[TheWiggman]

It got a bit lost in the end but overall I tend to agree with it. Bear in mind we AHB members are probably going to be biased based on the fact our hobby IS craft brewing, so we are - I would hope - in full support of the craft beer industry.
However...
I completely agree with this whole supposed definition of craft beer. It isn't a defined term but rather a flexible word that, in line with the article, is used primarily as a marketing term and is as flexible as the marketers want it to be. I agree that craft beer isn't VB, XXXX, Swan etc. What I don't necessarily agree with is that craft is Matilda Bay. I a not saying it isn't, but it's in the grey area that the marketing machine has jumped upon and turned the term into a buzzword that this whole argument has deleted from.
I just had a Pintail Pale Ale and 4 Pines Stout. Craft? Don't care, loving them right now.
I recently had a Borenore Pale Ale. Completely on the other scale and is craft beer without a doubt. Locally produced and they sell it at one pub and at farmers markets. Didn't love it.
I see this whole craft beer movement thing as some sort of backlash against the monopoly of the megas. I completely support the concept of broadening the varieties on the market as I personally see this as the biggest problem having these mobs dominating the taps. We don't all want to drink in volumes, I know now I like to have a few beers and enjoy every one of them. With 5 lagers on tap I can't eno...
(TheWiggman cooks 2 pizzas, feeds bathes and beds kids, and consumes a few beers in the process)
... what was my point again? Well I can understand the sentiments of the author about the whole craft beer 'revolution'. It's gone past representing the small producer of unique beers to being a buzz term that the big mobs have got hold of and the hipsters have embraced. Don't be seen drinking beer, drink craft beer!
In reality we want to drink good beer. I think it's that simple.

 

[TimT]

What I got from it was "Don't think for yourself, just drink what we market to you". Appealing to the lowest common denominator in the drinking-public (much the same way that Labor appeals to the lowest common denominator in the voting public by campaigning on a Public Holiday for the "Grate" Final weekend, FFS!!!

Yes to all those things. Of course they're betting (rightly) that there's still a market for mass swill out there. Same as in Australia. Americans can be very nostalgic abut their megabrews, same as in Australia. Hell, I'm nostalgic about the days when every pub had a 'Carlton Draught' logo on it and you always knew what you'd get when you went in. And I don't even drink it anymore.

But I'm looking forward to the day when we reminisce nostalgically about the craft beers of the early 2010s.... and it'll come, and it'll come soon. "Remember when everyone used to drink IPAs? Heh, and there was that whole thing about Taylor Swift.... geeze, I haven't heard her music for ages....."

 

[MartinOC]

Tim, I still reminisce nostalgically about the mid-80's, when you could go into "The Royal" on Flemington Rd (before it was turned into the Redback Brewery), sit next to the fire with an exquisite pint of Bengal Blaster & play cards with your mates in relative quiet....or "The Loaded Dog" on St George's Rd before it became trendy & had to queue to get in.....