Wait,
I missed the bit where the mega brewers hold a gun to peoples head and force them to drink cheap, bad beer... I must have been out of town, which explains why I drink either homebrew or decent commercial beer.
Its not like the big brewers dont actually make any good beer...
they do. Its not like the (majority of) brewers at the mega breweries dont like good beer themselves...
they do and in fact are some of the most hard core beer geeks you will ever meet! The good beer
is there, the breweries make at least as much selling a slab of great beer as they do selling swill; and the bottles shops actually make
some money selling quality beer (they make next to nothing on the mega swill).... why in hell does everyone think that the breweries "want" you to only like flavourless crap?? Why would they? Its just nonsense!
The truth is that the breweries make lightly (no) flavoured beers with light body and high fizz, because thats what people want. Haven't you guys heard of focus groups??
Take 100 people, put them in a room, ask them what sort of beer they want you to make....
Answer --- Ummmm, "easy to drink", "not too expensive", "none of that dark beer ****", "well, I dont really like beer so nothing too bitter" repeat 94 more times ...... oh and there are 2 guys over in the corner saying something about flavour, malt and hops.
Mega brewer X, would actually quite like to make a lot of money, so unsurprisingly, he listens the hardest to the 98 flavour ******* and releases H'n'T or Extra Dry or Empire lager. The fact that Joe and Jim had something to say about quality and taste, is why you have Matilda Bay and James Squire.
Actually, it makes bugger all economic sense for the megas to waste time and money on their "craft" brew sections. Yeah, they are hedging their bets that the botique end of the market might turn into something bigger, but they
could smother it if they wanted and take it out of the equation... but they dont.
Instead they hire guys to promote the stuff, they send brewers to international beer competitions with beers like Barking Duck, they let the guy at the Portland brew up something like the Speculator, they host beer dinners where the freak from the mega brewery lets you taste the beer that he threw all the Brett and Pedio into just before he shoved it into a chardonay barrel for 6 months.
Those things aren't happening because the Mega breweries want to "force" crappy beer onto the market, they are happening, at least partially, because there
really are some people in the big brewing industry with a genuine passion for beer. They hold off the bean counters with one hand and brew fantastic beer with the other, all the while hoping that the unwashed masses will finally wake up and make great beer economically viable.
How about occasionally encouraging the big boys to do even more by telling them how much you like what they have done so far? Or.... you could just bitch about them trying to make a buck while they wait, till they give up.
End of rant
Thirsty
h34r:
PS: you must have gotten through at least a medium sized popcorn during that little tirade
