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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3961 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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By most "objective" measures typical West Coast IPAs should rank near the bottom; they're usually excessively bitter, with a cloying cough-syrupy sweetness underlying them. Yet this has become the beer snob beer par excellence, mainly because local craft breweries that don't quite know what they're doing yet can take advantage of the large margin of error something that hoppy provides and get started pretty quickly. MOst of the issues with mass-market beers come from the fact that all of them use a healthy amount of adjuncts to keep costs down. I've had craft versions of these beers from local breweries (shout out to Exile in Des Moines for offering the best example) and there is a significant improvement. The problem is that you still have to pay craft prices for these beers because they're brewed in small batches, which makes it difficult for them to occupy the same cultural position as High Life or something similar. If only a large brewery were to make a premium product without adjuncts and sell it for a few dollars more than the mainstream brands... which would create a new product that nobody wants because both the style and the concept of a mass market beer are anathema to beer snobs. I remember when something like Sam Adams was considered a premium product that most restaurants wouldn't have. Now, nobody seems to think there's anything particularly wrong with it, but no one is going out of their way to say it's a great beer. Same with Magic Hat. Same with Killian's. Even Yuengling Lager (which isn't the original Yuengling but a '90s innovation meant to latch on to the Sam Adams trend of brewing better beer) doesn't have the cachet it once had since they expanded their distribution beyond a few select markets; it used to be impossible to get in West Virginia and Ohio, even though they border Pennsylvania. Anyway, my overall point is that perception has a lot more to do with things than beer snobs want to admit. A craft beer usually has to be pretty bad before anyone wants to admit that it sucks. And no one will admit that some German Brewery that's been around since 1485 or whatever is actually sub par. The West Coast IPA model should theoretically be great for a mass market beer, because the flavor masking nature of heavy hop use would make it easy for them to get away with using a ton of adjuncts. But there's no market for a mass-market, low-cost IPA, because the people who drink IPAs will never drink a low-cost, mass-market beer.

Also, if there are German(or Czech, or Polish, or whatever) beers out there that are objectively better and cheaper than the American mass-market stuff then let me know what it is. Keep in mind that I'm used to paying about $20-$25 for a 30-rack of cans, and Pabst is usually on sale for $15.99, so it would have to compete with that to be truly worth it, though I don't mind paying more.

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