My fathers's dear friend Stese was close with the old brewmaster at Anchor Steam. He was in his 90's at the time and one day he told Stese to start following him around the brewery and watch how he did things so he could take over for him when he was gone. Stese dutifully observed the brewmaster and took over his duties when he died. Soon there was a kid following him around taking notes on a clipboard. Fritz Maytag took over the operation, expanded it, bought a fleet of trucks and gave steam beer in SF a second life.
Some of you may have had the experience of catching a show at Bottom of the Hill and reliving the NOFX song Scavenger Type:
Gigin alone at the bottom of the hill /
Our protagonist named Bill /
Sets his sights on an anchor steam pint /
All he needs is thirteen quarters /
Congregated in his hat
I swear they must have a pipe straight from the brewery for how fresh it is there.
Saw this comment and realized how long it had been since I listened to "Punk in Drublic", has to be at least 15 years. I immediately went to Scavenger Type but then to "Linoleum", "The Brews", "Don't Call Me White", and now "The Cause", brings back memories man :)
Thanks for that! I'll have to get a pint next time I'm there (for some prog-metal in like two weeks). Concert beer tastes better in glass glasses too heh
Sometimes a brewer realizes that concentrating on their core market makes more sense than trying to compete on crowded store shelves nationwide. New Glarus Brewing in Wisconsin is famous for refusing to distribute out-of-state. It's always worth taking a case home if I take a roadtrip.
I remember getting Anchor Steam in California nearly 20 years ago, having been told about it by a relative as something to try. And having been happy to try a different tasting beer. The other California one I liked was Sierra Nevada pale ale.
I feel like that was a much more innocent time. Now no matter where you are, there's a pile of competing craft beers, trying to out do one another across different dimensions (though mostly hops), it's hard to keep track. At the same time, good beer seems to mean a lot less now, because of how spoiled we all are.
> trying to out do one another across different dimensions (though mostly hops)
In places with younger craft markets, it's like an even split between hops and extreme naming/label graphics. Here in Seattle, beer names are like Obscure Mythology Reference and you might enjoy the Wikipedia hole it starts you on while you imbibe. The first craft brew I remember seeing visiting my original home state, Virginia, was literally named Raging Bitch with a fierce looking dog baring its teeth and blood-like splatters of red ink. It was actually a pretty decent stout IIRC.
Raging Bitch is made by Flying Dog brewery whose art is done by Ralph Steadman - well known for his collaborations with Hunter S Thompson. I started drinking it because of that fact after reading Fear and Loathing for the first time in college. It’s also nice and strong - 9% iirc
I love Steadman’s art but refuse to buy Flying Dog beer since their owner is a giant asswipe (don’t remember the details just something to do with mistreating employees).
Steadman also did the art for Anthony Bourdain’s cookbook - highly recommend that though.
edit: HST’s story on the Kentucky Derby features Steadman prominently and it’s my favorite of his after/along with Fear and Loathing and Hell’s Angels. It’s probably the most gonzo of the three as well.
I agree with the parent, it's a great piece and iirc it's where Thompson and Steadman first met up. If you're looking for something interesting to read during lunch today, this is for you.
I think you can quite correctly substitute Flying Dog for Brew Dog in the "owner is an asswipe and I won't buy anything from him" stakes:
'BrewDog, the fast-expanding craft beer firm, has apologised to former employees who accused the company and its co-founder James Watt of fostering a “culture of fear” in which workers were bullied and “treated like objects”.' [0]
BrewDog is a sad one for me. It was nice to see a brewery in the region I'm from (Aberdeenshire, Scotland) becoming a worldwide success. But their "punk" aesthetic is a bit cringe for a big corporate company, and the owner turning out to be a dick is a real turn-off and the beer isn't good enough for me to overlook it. There's another brewery in the area that I've been meaning to try out (likely impossible to find in Czech Republic), they've leaned into their Aberdeen identity pretty hard which is cool but idk what their beer is like https://www.fiercebeer.com
Just a waste IMO. Yes, sometimes I want a strong beer, but sometimes I want to spend an afternoon drinking and chatting with a friend. But I still want something that tastes good in that case!
My favourite thing to come out of the craft brew movement recently is the renewed interest in session beers and generally great beers a 4% or lower. I love being able to drink lots of really nice and interesting beers and just not feel drunk.
The industry in Atlanta shifted to these types of beers right around the start of the pandemic. Every brewery here now has a lager, rice lager, or low-abv pale ale. The best is Halfway Crooks [1]!
Yeah the super-strong ones are fun to try every now and then, but having >2x the alcohol of a normal beer is not something to be taken lightly. I've found myself favouring lower ABV recently - I like drinking beer but I don't really like being drunk and at my age I do not handle hangovers well, (currently fighting through one)
Hardly a waste; I never do the “spend all afternoon drinking” thing these days, and if I really want to, well these strong stouts are excellent to sip over a fairly long period of time because they taste great slightly warmed up
17.2%?!? That led me down the rabbit hole to find out beers with very high alcohol content. Apparently Brewmeister Snake Venom, at ABV 67.5%, is the highest.
Yes those super high ones are usually freeze concentrated (partially frozen, then ice is removed which removes water, what is left is stronger) multiple times to reach such high ABVs.
The highest you will see actually fermented is usually around 18-20%, but there are specialty yeasts that can get up to 25%. Then you can get even higher with extended aging in spirit barrels where some ABV is picked up by absorbing residual spirit as well as evaporation increasing the strength. Sam Adams Utopias for example comes in at 28%
Worth mentioning, freezing and skimming ice is a clever distillation process. It’s also illegal under any other circumstances that distillation would be illegal, but nobody much cares.
It’s pretty easy to get into the ~15% range with the right yeast (champagne yeast is the best starting point) and attention to sugar conversion (I wish I could remember the details here but I haven’t brewed for about a decade) and importantly for beer, good ventilation. I had a barleywine that should have been in this range ferment for about 12 hours and it clogged the airlock, exploded the carboy, and generally ruined everyone’s day. But not the way it was supposed to ruin anyone’s day.
It's not so much a problem of the yeast and attenuation. Nottingham should be fine up to 14% and for a high gravity beer somewhere above 75% attenuation.
The issue is yield and lautering. The mash is so thick, or rather there's so much of it, that proceses need to be adjusted to account for that, and from experience yields are much lower in a typical entry level craft brewing system (400L).
Since his non-German internet presence isn't great and iirc there's no Wikipedia article abut him I'd like to mention Georg „Schorsch“ Tscheuschner of "Schorschbräu" fame. He's quite the character and famous in German (home-)brewing circles because he's always chasing those high percentages (via the mentioned ice technique called Eisbock in German). His creations include the world's strongest Lager (16%) a pretty stronger Weizen (13%) and his high percentage entry, the Schorschbock (57%).
If you can find it, I can’t recommend it enough. I bought a carton of it, twice, that’s how great it is (in my opinion). Don’t ask how much the carton was though haha
Dry Irish stouts, like Guinness, are good and despite their reputation, are not (and should not be) anywhere near that strong. They come in at ~4.2% abv, like most "light" beers.
Ah, I had no idea about the artist! It came to mind because it’s pretty representative of the general theme I noticed, but also because the art was definitely striking in its own right.
I was just thinking that this weekend in the Seattle area as we wandered the aisles for six for the wife. It’s either an attempt to put the scariest-looking skull(s) on the label, or $SOMETHING $SEXUAL_REFERENCE $FARM_ANIMAL (e. g., Ass-Kickin’ Horny Goat Stout).
> It’s either an attempt to put the scariest-looking skull(s) on the label
One of the people behind Liquid Death water was on NPR some weeks back, and basically their entire deal, as told by him, was just taking canned water and applying craft beer branding.
Not to knock it, evidently it worked and, as far as the product and concept, was all they needed. Just thought it was funny—yeah, why not put an edgy name and skulls all over water?
Simi related, but i’m really glad something like liquid death became a thing! I go to a lot of live events, especially concerts, and I can now reliably buy sparkling water at almost every event.
Beforehand my choices were absurdly overpriced beers, sweetened drinks, or plain water. I’m a big fan of sparkling water, so this new development is nice, even if I don’t particularly care about the branding gimmicks.
The only reason I haven't bought one of those at Whole Foods is I don't want to deal with the cops seeing it in the cup holder in my car. Much better to buy the plastiboard container that says "Just Water" on the side[1] and fill it with vodka.
Flying Dog's Raging Bitch has a special place in my heart. It was the beer in my fridge many years ago on the day I got laid off. Got to drink that and watch the Women's World Cup instead of being at my awful job.
I'm a little bummed that Anchor Steam isn't going to be sold near me (Ohio) anymore, specifically because it was one of the few microbrews I could always find that wasn't over-the-top hoppy or wheaty or sour or chocolate-syrupy.
But at least the all-IPA all-the-time trend seems to have died down, and I do see local breweries with more pilsners and Kölsches.
Just a comment from someone living around Köln, those are not true kölsch beers since they cannot see the Kölner Dom from their brewery.
I find it quite fascinating that americans like kölsch. The first time, and only time, I saw kölsch outside of Germany was in Mountain View at some beer auction style tap bar in 2016. It was quite popular since it had a high price. I might assume it was due to the similarity with local/large batch beer.
Thankfully we’re starting to see a larger variety down here in Southern California. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality and availability of sours and stouts in the last few years
Sierra Nevada here on the east coast is brewed in Mills River, NC, just outside Asheville. I guess there must be some economic reason (abundant skilled brewer labor force?) for locating their east coast operations in a place that was already one of the most thriving local brewing scenes on this side of the country, but it just felt redundant to me.
One of the big reasons was the water [0] interns of both availability, quality and abundance.
> Water quality was one of the critical factors in the company’s choice of WNC from about 200 sites across the eastern U.S. […] it also learned there was some high-quality water to be found in aquifers throughout the region — primarily around Black Mountain.
Anchor Steam was my goto beer for a long time. I really miss Anchor Porter - I found a 6-pack of it back in 2003 while living in Helsinki (I was missing home/California). I ponied up the 18 euros (then) for the 6 pack and drank it like it was a rare gift - it was the last one they had.
Personally, I have so many great, local breweries, I never think to get anything from out of state, usually not even out-of-city. This sounds like a reasonable move seeing the proliferation of great beers.
Living Colorado... I pretty much feel the same way.
Within 15-20 minutes from my house there's Avery, Upslope, Left-hand, Oscar Blue's, Fritz, Wibby, Asher, Finkel & Garf, 300 Suns, Beyond the Mt., Sanitas, Wild Provisions, Vision Quest, Twisted Pine, Uhl's, etc.
All of them are at least decent... some of them are world class.
My city has a lot, but I personally can't share in them.
I will instantly vomit if I drink any local brews (in any locale). Same with whiskey.
I can drink nationally-distributed beers and vodka with no ill-effects.
I have no idea why. I'm jumping on this comment because I imagine there are some HN readers that might have a theory and I would be very interested in hearing them.
I hate local beers. Local wine makes sense, there is terroir, a sense of place etc. Local beers are just some weird competition to see who can make the hopiest bitterest beer. I don't want to try a new lager every time I cross county lines, when I want beer I want something reliable.
Beer is incredibly difficult to keep shelf-stable. International beers, unless very specific efforts are taken, will taste off. I heard a story that Austrian beer enthusiasts just assumed American beers tasted "skunky" because that's how they tasted after importing them. Time, temperature, and light are enemies. Anheuser-Busch has a dozen breweries across the US.
I'm not a fan of hops, but the PNW grows 96% of hops in the US--so it makes sense local breweries up there are known for IPA. Historically, beer styles leaned into local water mineral content; Pilsners from Germany/Czech Republic and Stout/Porter from Britain/Ireland.
Regional wines (local wines shipped widely) make sense and local beers do, too.
The skunky odor/flavor comes from light exposure to hops and it’s easily prevented with dark bottles or cans. Other herbs work well as preservatives and don’t get skunky at all. Beer can be shelf stable basically indefinitely if well kept, and often ages very well.
If it's easy to prevent, why is it so much more of a problem than for wine? Budweiser had a “born on date” and later switched it to a "freshest before" date. Other breweries insist on cold shipping--that's quite expensive.
Wines (generally) don't use hops. Hops are such a strange flower (or weed depending on your view of hops) that provide a lot of very complex molecules that break down in interesting ways over time. At their best those molecules are flowery and subtly bitter. At their worst they break down into skunky things, some of which at extreme worsts are poisonous. Grapes have some complex molecules, but not the same sorts of bitter sulfides that hops do.
It’s not really much of a problem. Beers that go skunky are typically sold in green or clear bottles. It really is the exposure of hops to light that causes it (and I have confirmed it with homebrew batches where some bottles skunked up rapidly while others lasted multiple years with no such effects, and even aged quite well).
For beers like Bud that are mostly sold in cans, and/or Bud Light often sold in brown bottles, the date labels are generally a marketing gimmick to distinguish from other brands without getting into these kinds of specifics (they come off beer-nerdy and that’s off putting to a lot of their target market).
Again, so this isn't confusing for anyone, this comment is totally wrong. Beer breweries do this because there's a clear change in flavor for beers left unrefrigerated and/or exposed to light.
Too deep in the chain to reply directly but I opened a 2009 Abyss a few months ago and it was still delicious. The label even tells you to wait about 18 months after bottling before even considering whether to drink it.
They do change flavor over time, as do wines. It’s not necessarily a problem. My comment never claimed that there’s no change in flavor, only that flavor worsening and in particular skunkiness is trivially controllable. If you or anyone else disagrees with this, I invite you to try the oldest Deschutes Abyss you can find and describe exactly how it’s worse than the current year, or how you found even a hint of skunk in it.
It is a problem; that's why they put dates on them. You claimed it's for marketing, and it's not. Wine in supposed to be aged, most beers are not (sours and stouts are the exception). It's like eating day old food from a restaurant and pretending that's how the chef intended it to taste.
I've had almost every year of abyss going back to 2011. You picked a beer and a style that is intended to be aged, and the flavor changes over time much like wine. That has nothing to do with Budweiser, IPAs, pilsners, etc that are not supposed to be aged.
That's absolutely not true. IPAs cannot be shelf stable past a few months if unrefrigerated. They start to lose the hoppy aroma and taste and taste more muted. The longer you go the more skunky it tastes.
It is fair that IPA hop aromas do diminish over time, it really depends on the beer how that affects its quality. But if you don’t expose them to light they definitely don’t get skunky, at any temperature over many years.
Which was of course the whole point of India Pale Ales. Chuck a load of hops in the beer, preserve it on a boat ride to India. Probably the hops aroma did diminish, but the beer didn’t go off.
The entire style was an attempt to make beer that would not go bad while on long unrefrigerated journeys to India from England, using extra amounts of the alpha acids in hops as a preservative.
Beer is super easy to make shelf stable. Most of the non craft beer you drink is pasteurized and re-carbonated. Some craft can be bottle conditioned, both I would consider shelf stable.
> Local beers are just some weird competition to see who can make the hopiest bitterest beer.
It wasn’t always this way. I remember when our local breweries had a wide range of regular styles, and many specialized in whatever weird quirky thing they were into. That got me to explore Trappist styles, Flemish style sours, a whole bunch of English styles that I didn’t like at first but eventually became my thing because they’re so subtle, and a huge variety of different adjuncts regardless of hoppiness.
Local beer wasn’t (usually) about the locality of where it was brewed and fermented, it was about the locality of the humans involved and their whims. I think this still exists in some places, but IPA has basically become the “other beer” besides lager everywhere and it’s really a damn shame. And it’s basically ruined beer for me. I actually like IPA, but I’d lose interest anything that becomes so uniform.
I agree the style of beers made "locally" is weird, but the justification for local beer, on keg at least, is that it does seem hard to transport them successfully. In the UK beers do taste best on tap when you're within about 50 miles of the brewery. I'm sure they could be transported further safely, but in practice them almost never are.
The UK beer market is quite different, especially when considering cask ale.
This beer is unpasteurised and still fermenting in the cask when it leaves the brewery! The carbonation of the beer comes from creation of CO2 during fermentation, rather than injection of CO2 post-fermentation.
This makes for a pretty unstable beer, that doesn’t travel particularly well and should be consumed reasonably quickly!
British cask ale is the most underrated beer. Amazing you can’t find it outside the UK. I have a feeling someone will make some form of it in the USA to differentiate.
Nothing like getting a proper pint of whatever is local.
I'm with GP on reliability though - I'd rather have a can of a known bitter than a local 'IPA' on tap that I don't know (and the other side of the bar doesn't care, or share a common language to decide) if is a 'proper' IPA, or one of these very pale, extremely fizzy things that seem to be in vogue and call themselves IPAs, when to me they're closer to a lager and almost any (non IPA-style) bitter would've been closer to what I expected. Sometimes I can tell from the label it will (or I fear it will, so don't try and can't say for sure) be like that, but certainly not always, and that's not always practical.
Yeast has just as much "sense of place" and "terroir" as influences wine. Starting yeasts generally come prepackaged from just a few mass factories and the vast majority of brewers just rely on that. Not enough brewers appreciate "sourdough" styles of beer that rely on local wild forms of yeast (and to be fair, in many regions of the world the local wild yeasts are poorly adapted for brewing and need a lot of work to get there), but yeast is such a short-lived organism that it adapts quickly to the environments you give it and what you feed it even when you are using fresh packets directly from the national factory as a baseline every brewing session.
Local brewers with even the smallest bit of Belgian influence often have at least some small idea of this. Brewers that enjoy exploring styles known as "farmhouse" or "spontaneous" or "common" are generally exploring truly local beers in both flavor profiles and execution.
If brewing was as lucrative as fancy wines, you'd probably hear a lot more about breweries staffing local yeast experts and building yeast labs the way fancy vineyards hire soil experts. (I do know of at least a couple that do. New Glarus is a stand out for a number of reasons, including that their commitment to local also means that they never distribute beer outside of Wisconsin.)
I was in Shelter Cove, CA last week. If you ran a contest to find the city in California that's most far away from everything as possible, Shelter Cove would be a solid contender. It has a brewery - actually the only restaurant in town most nights (there's another, but it's only open fri/sat/sun).
The beer was actually pretty amazing. What surprised me is that they do multiple stouts. It's getting hard to find dark beers in CA. My guess is that the coastal temps and generally overcast weather in Shelter Cove mean that the "local" beer tends towards what we normally think of as winter beer. Or it could just be that the owner likes porters and stouts as much as I do.
I wouldn't discount local beer. Unfortunately, I've never much cared for Anchor Steam, so it's hard for me to get worked up about the OP. Great tour though.
Local ingredients must be incredibly niche though? The amount of US beer that must use imported UK, German, Belgian hops? Even if grown locally, the varieties. at which point this is like comparing Shiraz & Syrah; South African Merlot with Australian. Except without a record of it making a difference at all itself - intuitively it should be subtler - hops are a component, 'grape juice' is the whole thing. The water used for ale (more analogous to grapes really) does have a documented effect. That's probably more homogenous than it used to be, and the big boys probably use distilled water and add whatever mineral components they want, but certainly that could be significant for US vs UK microbreweries, or certain intra country comparisons.
Water is an important ingredient in beer that affects the taste. Soft water is best for some beers, like Czech pilsner and similar traditional lagers, where as hard, mineral-laden water produces the best dark beers. The water in Dublin, Ireland is, for example, famously alkaline.
Of course it's possible, to a limited extent, to alter the mineral content of the water, but it gets expensive.
Hops, of course, are a key ingredient in beer, and they definitely do have terroir. The Saaz hops grown in the US are not identical to Saaz from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
It's trivial and cheap to make water harder, home brewers do it all the time to replicate specific styles. It's more difficult to make hard water soft.
Also while hops have terroir, hops are dried and vacuum sealed and kept cold so that they can be shipped with no change in flavor. (Except of course for once-a-year wet hop beers which truly are very local)
> t's trivial and cheap to make water harder, home brewers do it all the time to replicate specific styles
I'm aware of this. I did it for my ribbon-winning brews. It is cheap at the home brewer scale, but at commercial scales, maybe not so much.
> can be shipped
Sure, it's possible to get genuine Saaz hops shipped from the Czech Republic to California. Again, A home brewer might be willing to shell out top dollar for a few ounces, but cost and availability is going to be a much larger factor. I've know craft brewers to abandon making certain styles because of uncertain supplies of key hops, and being unwilling or unable to switch to a similar variety.
There's a reason why so many the American West Coast IPA became a style defined by Centennial, Cascade, Mosaic, Amarillo, Chinook, Simcoe, Strata or Citra, and not like English IPAs and their Target, First Gold, English Goldings and Fuggles
The popularity of American hops in American craft beers is in large part because Ken Grossman wanted to use American hops and wanted to set himself apart from European-style hops. To my knowledge that's pretty different from terroir as it's typically meant, and also Sierra Nevada is pretty far from where Cascade was grown when they started buying it.
By the time you get to Stone or Lagunitas and their West Coast IPAs, the hops are being packaged as I described and again we're not really dealing with terroir. The Chicago Lagunitas products tastes identical to the California ones.
Adjusting the water for different styles or consistency across production facilities is a thing that is done at commercial scale. I had a professor in college who figured out how to do that for Bass' UK production facilities in the 1980s.
People get it in their heads that small and local means good or at least better than the stuff mass-produced by MegaCorp, but that's not always the case. I think beer is a case where it's hard to beat Big Beer.
Heineken, the second-biggest brewery in the world, moved 231.2 million hectoliters of beer in 2021[0], or nearly 19,000 acre-feet of beer (!). How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?
I think with big beer, you get consistency of product and usually pricing. That's great for some people who don't want to be fussing with beer. I used to care about tasting every obscure beer from a location, but over time I've started to care a lot less.
For wine and vintages, the absolute consistency is less of an issue. They aspire to some consistency, but a little variation is part of the romance.
The great thing is that in wine and beer, you get both ends. You get the familiar brands and the loony craft beers with outrageous labels. If I favour smaller producers, a good part of it is that I like to support younger businesses. Big producers pretending to produce young-business products is a bit meh though.
Funny, Lagunitas is now owned by the Heineken company. Heineken became the second largest brewer in the world after the merger of Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller.
I'm really confused at the general lack of knowledge about this topic on HN. Heineken is one of the worst beers made, and local beers, while mostly not great, are certainly better. Look at untappd for statistically significant ratings.
> How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?
In my opinion: most of them. Heineken is not a good beer. It tastes similar to other mass-produced stuff: inoffensive bordering on flavorless. I'm actually stunned at the comment. It's like if I asked how many local restaurants make hamburgers better than Wendy's (Budweiser is McDonald's in this analogy).
There aren’t many locally produced lagers hardly anywhere, so it’s hard to compare. They take much longer to produce than ales, and require active cooling in most places.
Beg to differ, some beers age really well. A few years back I bought a couple of cases of gueuze that I'm keeping in a cellar. Every few months I drink one and it's now 8 years old. The evolution has been quite nice so far.
I prefer to give money to my neighbor than to someone who lives across the country or the world, when given the choice. That's it for me, everywhere has good beer.
local breweries are like the least competitive businesses out there; they seem to be really tight with each other since making money on beer is super hard these days
Unfortunately hops is a migraine trigger for me and drinking overly hoppy beers gives me headaches very quickly and last quite a while, so I stick to low hops beers, loggers, ales porter stouts etc. But good quality low hops beers can be hard to find now!
I like trying different beers and having novel experiences. Trying a local beer isn’t always amazing, but sometimes it’s unique and great, worth the risk to me.
I'm guilty of the same. I'm about halfway between Portland and Bend, which are both high on the list of breweries per capita, so I can try a huge variety of beers without ever needing to look outside the state. I try to get local beer whenever we travel, but I mostly find that it's just the same as the local stuff, it doesn't feel different.
I also find it extremely disconcerting (though basically in a good way) when I’m traveling and none of my local favorites are available. Yeah, of course I’ll take the opportunity to try something new and local, but it feels weird these days having local favorites that aren’t part of the national monoculture and just aren’t available elsewhere. I like it!
I live in New England. There isn’t a single brewery in any New England state that would cause an uproar if it ceased to sell beer tomorrow.
Sure I have some preferred beers but they are all interchangeable in the big picture.
Such is progress - there is no more regional taste, only trend. Even the bottle conditioned beer you stand in line for on vacation - a bottle of Duvel will be reliably better and probably cheaper.
Any of Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, or Lawsons would be an uproar, and they’re all within like 60 miles of each other. Across New England there are many.
I think your average local brewery has trouble making a good tasting New England style IPA. If you found any NEIPA beers like Heady Topper or Sip of Sunshine, and are widely available, honestly let me know. Other beer styles are easier to recreate, but the NEIPA style is hard to get right.
Sam Adams and and Trillium would both probably cause a bigger uproar than this Anchor Brewing company, which honestly I have never heard of not being in California.
Some of the younger readers might not realize that Anchor was at the forefront of the American craft brewing renaissance. Back then Canadians would laugh at USA beer as all tasting like water. Only Europe had craft brew. Fast forward to now and the market is saturated. There are more craft breweries per capita in the USA than in Germany. We’re beyond peak craft brew.
Peak craft beer implies that the trend is now on a downward trajectory. I don't know if that is the case, craft beer feels really ingrained in the culture at this point.
1. Is there a decrease in craft breweries being started, or total gallons of craft beer being produced?
2. Is there a decrease in beer brewing hobby supplies?
To #1, at least according to the Brewers Association figures (https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/natio...), craft beer sales have been fairly stagnant since about 2015. That has been kind of a problem for an industry that was seeing investment at a rate that would seem to presume that this rocketshp was headed to the moon. And, maybe most pertinent to the situation for Anchor, regional and microbrewery beer sales have been in decline. The only segment of the craft beer industry that's growing is taprooms.
To #2, yes, at least in my area there are about half as many homebrew supply shops as there were ten years ago.
As to #2, how much of that is due to online sales? The last homebrew store in my town closed down last year, but there are is much wider selection of both equipment and ingredients available to me now than at any other time.
We're beyond the peak from a critical view. Most innovation from brewers today is coming in terms of marketing or making numbers go up (loading up on ABV or IBUs), while seemingly treating flavor as secondary.
I'm definitely not saying no one is making good new beer anymore, just that the improvements from the ~80s-00s has slowed down.
Treehouse is almost definitely in that conversation as well. Hill Farmstead as well.
The uproar is probably more among folks who follow the industry though. Most people have seen Anchor at a grocery store at some point. They were, I'm pretty sure, a natural niche craft brewery before those things were normal. In the same zone as places like Sam Adams or New Belgium or Sierra Nevada. You didn't have to really be "into beer" to know what they were and maybe enjoy buying a Christmas Ale from them every year as a seasonal thing.
To OP's point, there's less places like that now, but that's because I have 3 local breweries I'd be sad about if they closed, instead of 1-2 national breweries. I'd be sad if Trillium or Alchemist closed, but it's not as if I could buy them without traveling to the area, so it's more of a "aww, that's a bummer" and less of a change to my life.
I'm not sure either is better/worse though. We've just moved beyond the sort of craft beer monoculture. We don't just have 2-3 Christmas Ales we all drink, in the same way we don't all watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or all talk about the new episode of ER every week.
Anchor Brewing was among the first good American craft beer I could consistently find in pubs and bars across Europe. It was also the beer that really made me aware that there was more to American beer than Coors and Bud light.
Not being in California is not a reason you wouldn't know it.
If you ever looked up the history of beer in the US or US beer styles you would know it. All the people in the craft beer industry certainly do. Maybe the craft beer drinkers in parts of the country don't know it but Steam/California Common is one of the few original US beer styles. And Anchor was one of the first in the modern craft beer revolution.
All their beers taste like one beer with some kind of flavor packets added to them to get the different varieties. I don't know if that's what they do—surely it's not?—but damn is it ever what it tastes like. I've never encountered another brewery that gives me that vibe.
I read an article in a craft brewing mag (might’ve been “Celebrator” circa 2003) that pointed out how the craft brewers association kept revising upward the number of barrels/year production that still qualified as “craft” so that it continued to accommodate Sam Adams.
I've seen Anchor Steam in good beer bars and stores on the Gulf coast, East coast, and great lakes. In Houston I have no trouble (until now, I guess) finding one or two of the magnum size Christmas ales to take to holiday parties and have been doing so for several years.
The founder of Boston Beer Company (brewers of Sam Adams) has talked about how beer drinkers now want to try one of everything and are endlessly moving from label to label, whereas in the past drinkers would settle on one brand and stick with it for years. This hurts the “small” (versus “micro”) brewers like Anchor because they’re viewed as “too corporate”.
Yes. And just like you’re implying, it has nothing to do with the beer quality itself (which might even be better now that they’re owned by Sapporo [1]) but some other criteria like “being cool”.
[1] Note that I said “might be better [quality]…” Without knowing the details of how Anchor beer is made specifically, corporate ownership can bring more resources and remove barriers, enabling “more, better” or it can exploit a trusted brand by using it to sell a lower quality product until consumers catch on. My bet would be that Sapporo is doing the former.
At some point you try enough and settle back into old predictable. Two of the right answers as always good fallbacks are Edmund Fitzgerald and Newcastle.
The press release is hysterical, insisting yuengling is America's oldest brewery while acknowledging their partner molson is over two centuries old. (Everyone knows Canada isn't America.)
I stopped drinking Yuengling when they got cozy with Trump in 2016. So many other superior breweries in Philly - Yards, Victory, Attic just to name a few.
I don't really believe in this whole stupid 'boycott them because they don't align with my values' bullshit, people should be free to express their political opinions however they see fit
What, because I say other people are free to express themselves politically?
All I said dude was that I don't believe in it and that I think what they were doing is stupid.
Other people can do what they want, even if its pointless. Because pretty much everyone does shit (like boycott) more because it makes them feel good ("look at me! I'm stickin it to the man!"), not because it is effective.
I suppose if everyone measured their activities on effectiveness it might create a hole in the space-time continuum, so many idiotic jobs and actions would be eliminated.
As someone targetted by the GOP's bullshit, I still don't care.
Half-assed personal boycotts don't present the kind of numbers needed to effect change.
Trump and his cohorts getting their asses locked up does. Burning everything to the ground that belongs to neonazis does. The BLM protests did far more damage and effected far more change than the combined power of everyone who boycotts Chik-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, or Yuengling.
Personal boycotts don't have to have a large impact or meaning outside of however you feel about them. They're just for you: you can decide to allow your principles affect your economic activity or you can default into the powerless assumption that it's not worth the effort.
I think it's a worthwhile exercise to ask yourself before you make a purchase somewhere that you feel OK with the ethical implications of your purchase - and I say this as someone who does compromise on my ethical positions constantly for convenience. It still matters.
They regularly distribute to New York City and have for several years now. Philadelphia as well. They also send some to California on a semi-regular basis. It has also shown up in Denver a few times.
That used to be the case, but they do officially distribute to limited areas. New York primarily has been receiving regular shipments of Heady Topper for several years now. During COVID they sent shipments to California and Denver, and have continued to do so on an occasional basis. Monks Cafe in Philly also has received shipments. All through proper distribution channels.
There's a handful of bars throughout NY that you can see at least Heady Topper at. In the capital region, Albany Ale & Oyster and The Ruck will have it with regularity. Seeing Focal Banger is much rarer, and then all their other beers are essentially taproom in Stowe only though.
Their beer might be subjectively better in a head-to-head with the dozens of other beers that are just like them, but there are dozens of other beers that are just like them.
It probably depends on the geographical scope of the uproar. Trillium and Treehouse shutting down suddenly would cause quite the kerfuffle for people living in the Boston area. Allagash from Maine would cause a national uproar in my opinion too.
Narragansett is in New England! It's not exactly craft beer, but the bumper stickers on practically every car in RI tell me its following is pretty devoted. It's generally my beer of choice at bars, too, but I could survive if I had to go back to High Life.
Switchback is also pretty good. It's not a big name style but it's very well done for what it is. Most people don't know about it, though, it seems.
Allagash? Sam Adams? Budweiser (they have in operation in NH iirc). Smuttynose in NH? I feel like there are breweries across new england that if they stopped tomorrow would affect a lot of people, but maybe on a smaller scale. Of course people would buy something else, but they would still be sad to see it go.
20 years ago, Anchor was pretty decent. Like Sam Adams, there wasn't a lot of competition for US-brewed beer beyond the Bud-style macrobrews. Now there's a dozen good-to-great breweries in every city, and no reason to buy Anchor Steam anymore.
I disagree, despite living in one of the earlier craft brew havens (Seattle). Anchor Steam was already a unique offering when I happened on it ~15 years ago, and its uniqueness has only been more pronounced as the craft(ish) market has consolidated around IPAs. Anchor Porter isn’t nearly so unique a style, but it’s an exceptional one in the category and has consistently been my preference over local porters even when they were more common. Their winter seasonal really is stellar, and has long stood out in a category that’s basically become a mix of mislabeled IPAs and the occasional barleywine-ish heavy ale.
Not passing judgement on the quality of Anchor Steam.
But the OP is absolutely right - there are now good to great breweries pretty much everywhere in the US. It’s hard to be a national beer company if you aren’t humongous.
People aren’t even looking at your stuff. The beer section at the gas station near my house is 50% local and 50% watery stuff. I have no idea if they carry Anchor Steam or not because I don’t look in that section and haven’t for years.
Note that some breweries, like Lagunitas, have effectively become local in multiple places by opening breweries in other states far away.
Yeah I do agree that being a national craft brewery is tough, and I don’t begrudge Anchor leaving the national market. I don’t even begrudge Elysian entering it by selling to AB (though lots of folks here do). My disagreement is only with “no reason” to buy Anchor. There’s a glut of high quality beer on the market, but very little of it is a reasonable substitute for what Anchor brews, and I have gone out of my way when it might be stocked, even though I know that I’m an outlier in even my own competitive local market.
I know quite a bit about Anchor, who used to be an SF institution. After the new Giants baseball park was built in 2000 Anchor as an independent local company were going to build an additional brewery there in 2013.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/Anchor-Br...
Sadly this never came to fruition due to the big beer bust a few years later. Lagunitas sold out to Heineken, Anchor to Sapporo etc - there was a big drop off in sales due to all the endless 6 month lifespan craft IPAs that split the market (many of these went bust too).
Lagunitas and Anchor are now a shadow of their former selves after cost cutting etc. Keith Greggor's innovations when he was running Anchor are now a distant memory. The recent mediocre rebranding of Anchor is an indicator of how out of touch Sapporo are with the market.
Killing what doesn't make enough money. To a corporation, a product line that sells reliably and consistently year after year is a failure unless it can be turned into something that pushes the stock price ever upward.
I think craft beer fans would argue that their Christmas Ale is iconic and provides much of their respect as a brand and that discontinuing just pushes the brand further into irrelevancy.
Pulling back to California makes sense of sales aren’t strong enough, but also killing off a beloved brand seems that it could hurt in the long run.
Conspiracy stuff: just removing competitors outright and taking advantage of inroads to sell what they really want to sell (their own brands).
A similar thing I saw: Asahi was in charge of Budweiser distribution in Japan. Absolutely miserable sales (not that I like Budweiser, or would drink it by choice), almost no presence. AB got the rights back to sell it, and now Budweiser is a reliable presence in many places and I see it out there in ways I never did.
My head canon is that Asahi got the distribution rights purely to slow roll it and make it so that AB would have no reason to build up a local presence. That way Asahi protects its local brands and simply needs to send some executive once a year to be like "hey I dunno nobody seems interested in this drink"
And suddenly a great mystery is solved! I had Anchor Steam in 2013 thereabouts and liked it quite a lot. When it became available locally I was happy to get it but it didn't quite taste as I remembered it. As time went on I quit buying it because it just wasn't as good as I remembered it to be.
Might not have had anything changed in the recipe itself. Beer (and cooking) scale weirdly and the flavors you associate with one size of batch change completely when you scale up to larger batches. For beer, it maybe isn't even that surprising given how much living yeast contributes to flavor and yeast is highly susceptible to environmental conditions including size of fermenting container or subtle things like location of fermenting container (even sometimes within the same building).
Like Guinness, beer tastes different/better when sampled near it's source. Staying California is likely a good thing for the quality of the product consumed.
E.g. up in Northfield Minnesota they make Marshmallow Mateys, a ripoff of lucky charms made by Malt-o-Meal. In the dorm cafeteria at St. Olaf College the flavor is like nothing else anywhere in the world. Once you taste it there where they make it, everything else is a sad stale imitation.
I mean, Guinness tastes 'better' in Ireland because it's more popular, similar to how Miller on draft tastes 'better' in America - not because Miller makes it close to the bar, but because drinks that sell faster are fresher, sit in lines less, etc.
I took the Christmas Ale tour last year. Little did I know it may be the last! The tour guide made a verrrrrrry interesting and unexpected comment about the rebrand. He said that it was part of the sale contract. I.e. the old owner put it in the contract that they had to rebrand. I am 90% sure I heard that correctly and am not making it up, because it was so strange and unexpected on my ears.
They used to brew small batches of Old Potrero whiskey in their warehouse across the street. Then they would hand it all over to their distributor and have no idea where it ended up. Ever since learning that, it's been a game to spot it at stores and restaurants and pick some up. I've even found a bottle 3,000 miles away on the east coast.
Since it was just riding along with the steam beer, I'm guessing the whiskey's distribution will also be restricted to CA now.
If you're implying it was because it was sold to Sapporo, it's possible the causality is wrong. It might have been sold because it was difficult to operate profitably, especially given how much the craft beer market has intensified.
Back in college, my friends and I got a pony keg of the Merry Christmas and Happy New Year ale -- probably our biggest beer mistake. We had to force ourselves to finish it and punished each other with beer pong just to empty the damn thing. I don't think I could ever touch that beer again.
Their Christmas ale is different every year. I coincidentally just went on the tour of the Anchor Brewery last weekend. They already had a preview of what this year's Christmas ale will be, but they only sample it there.
This pops up from time to time in the UK and I was always quite fond of it after a trip to San Francisco over a decade ago. Sounds like UK and US craft beer culture have suffered similar fates of exploding numbers of IPAs, very few of which seem to justify their existence. I live in Sheffield which has a very strong craft ale culture but one thing I like about the US is you get more interesting lagers and steam beers, whereas fizzy beers are mostly sneered at by aficionados here. But sometimes, for example the current heatwave in the UK (which I’m sure Americans would laugh at), nothing beats that Ice Cold in Alex moment.
Ah, I was wondering where the pressure was coming from.
The idea that this 150 year old brewery is closing down a truly cornerstone beer in craft beer history because the label art is expensive - despite weathering untold recessions and tough periods - strains credulity
Ballast Point had a similar trajectory. They got bought for a gigabuck and now are just gone.
Why the hell would you buy a company and then screw it up? In the case of Ballast Point, all Constellation Brands had to do was leave the bought company alone.
And, no, I don't believe that the issue is because you can buy great beers in every market. Hogwash. Maybe I can buy IPA, IPAer, IPAest, and IPAestest in every market--maybe. However, dark, heavy porters like old school Victory at Sea seem to be very thin on the ground nowadays.
(Side question: Why is everything in craft brew now shipping in cans instead of bottles? When did that happen?)
My understanding is also that canning lines can be a lot more compact than bottling lines, so cheaper/easier to install in a smaller brewery. For a while, I know there were a couple local breweries who essentially time-shared a canning line on the back of a truck that would just drive between the breweries and was cheaper than all of them buying it themselves.
>- They weigh less and are more compact than bottles
This is the real key one. My intel from a brewery that was sadly bought by Coke was that the savings in transit & shipping is staggering. More beverages in the same amount of space, which also means less costs for refrigeration.
> I can buy IPA, IPAer, IPAest, and IPAestest in every market--maybe. However, dark, heavy porters
I'm totally with you, though my personal love is sour beers. IPA rules the market, to the point where I have trouble distinguishing between whichever super-hoppy IPA is currently the best. But good sour beers are not nearly so common. If someone ever buys Cascade Brewing and kills it, I will be wildly irritated.
I do see that I can buy their good stuff in cans now. I actually think that's alright. They still sell it in bottles, too, but the upside of the can is that it's 250ml, versus the 750ml bottle. One bottle will take care of my entire evening and then some, so the option to just open a can at a time is appealing.
There's a bunch of Minnesota breweries doing some amazing sours, and many of them are only around for a season or two before they switch up the fruits. I'm so happy about it because I was totally burnt out on IPAs.
And now that everyone isn't so IPA-happy there are some great examples of varieties like Gose and Kolsch that I hadn't even heard of before.
IPAs really suck. There’s a plethora of beer types, and we get hoppy trash forced on us.
Craft breweries love the IPA for three reasons. First, they’re one of the easiest beers to make. Second, they stay the most stable on the shelf/truck. Third, toxic style trend. But mostly, it’s the first two reasons.
They are not one of the easiest beers to make, but in fact one of the hardest. They’re very susceptible to oxygen ingress and the high hopping rates can cause diacetyl production + hop creep which can ruin the beer.
They’re also one of the most expensive beers to make based on the cost of hops and the typical amount of hops used per barrel produced.
They do not stay the most stable on shelves / truck as they can fade quickly and are heat sensitive. Heat can quickly cause off flavors in IPAs. If you keep an IPA, especially a hazy, longer than 6-8 weeks you’re going to have an inferior tasting product so you have to turn them quickly via taproom pours & hyping up can sales. There’s a reason why no one ships IPAs overseas like they do with Belgian & German styles. They don’t travel well.
Breweries brew them because they’re a very popular style and they can charge $18-24 for a 4 pack where-as a lager or lower ABV beer cannot typically sell for the same price. They can also increase the grain by ~30% and make a double IPA which can sell for closer to $24 for a 4-pack.
This is why you see six-packs for $15-18 of lagers or similar styles, the customer expectation is different.
I can understand not liking IPAs or thinking they’re overdone but they aren’t the easiest style nor the most shelf stable.
Haha I mean it’s strange considering IPAs were created for long-haul travels but fast-forward & we’ve now made hazy IPAs that don’t travel well at all.
Hazies typically have 1/2 to 1/8th the amount of IBUs (bitterness) to older school “west coast” IPAs which is why they don’t get the same benefit as older school IPAs which traveled better + had more stability due to the hops.
I think you’re getting your breweries mixed up. Cascade only makes sours and they are owned by a local group in Portland with the founder still heavily involved.
The craft beer industry used to look down on cans as inferior and only for cheap beer. But I think much of that was just an image thing, likely resulting from prohibitively high costs for small breweries to can their beer in the past. Slowly craft came around to cans and canning lines and can labeling options became affordable.
Also the new school breweries 10 years ago like Trillium, Treehouse, Other Half all came on the scene with 16oz cans and sticker labels as well as the new NEIPA style that became so hot. I think that did a lot to improve the image of cans among consumers. Especially newer craft fans.
As far as the cans, it's just a better way to package beer. It stays fresher longer due to less oxidation and also no light infiltration.
As far as Ballast Point in particular, I can only offer conjecture. Sculpin was great ten years ago, but the craft has moved forward and I don't feel like Ballast Point kept up. In my opinion, their recipes are dated. Whether that's due to the acquisition or not I couldn't say, but I believe that's why they've fallen out of favor.
You are a few years behind the merger and acquisition market conditions.
The ballast point buy out by constellation brands was probably very much the peak of the craze around craft breweries.
Ballast point was very savy in increasing their unit sales numbers. That 12$ a 6 pack in the California market was unheard of at the time and made sales projections go off the charts.
Of course it was bullshit and unsustainable but their investors took it line and sinker..
The sheer amount of competition with thousands of breweries all over, to me means its a good local business (lifestyle in hn lingo), and a very tough regional business it you want to grow.
> Why the hell would you buy a company and then screw it up? In the case of Ballast Point, all Constellation Brands had to do was leave the bought company alone.
It would almost never make economic sense to buy a business and then leave it alone. The profitability of the current operation would be factored into the price, so leaving it alone means you're just wasting money buying it. There are obviously exceptions to this but that should be the general rule.
No, you buy a company to make changes. Perhaps you intend to find synergies to cut costs or expand distribution -- or other ways to increase profits that the current management isn't doing. Obviously they wouldn't intend to screw it up, but I'm sorry that your beloved brewery was a victim to corporate shenanigans.
I think this is part of the reason why Berkshire Hathaway has been so successful. Sure they buy good companies, but for the most part they buy them, keep the current management and then leave them alone to continue to do the things that made the company successful in the first place.
Happily, Ballast Point beers are still made under license locally here in New Zealand (by Behemoth Brewing) and are available fresh in my local supermarket. Yum!
Ok, you're calling this sentiment "hogwash", but I think it might be testable. Name the locale you say you can only get IPAs in, and we can probably search quickly to see if there are regional breweries there, and what they're selling. Obviously, in Chicago, we're spoiled for regional craft beer options (although the last time I was drinking beer, which was years ago, we'd still be pulling good brett sours in from Michigan).
Let's get concrete about this. I sort of believe what other people are saying, that regardless of what Anchor makes available outside California, we're far better off today than we were in Anchor's heyday. But maybe I'm wrong! It'd be interesting to find out.
1. We've reached Peak IPA. It was novel a couple decades ago, but geez, you can't taste the beer for the hops any more.
2. "Craft beer" has become a branding exercise. A lot of it is being brewed in contract breweries that will make a batch of whatever recipe you provide, with any label art you want. Bingo, craft beer. A couple of breweries in my region, in conversations, people say: "Oh yeah, they also brew for brands W, X, Y, and Z.
I end up bringing home something from one or two mid priced regional brands that taste good but don't break the bank.
My key takeaway as well. The moment I read that line I knew it was just corporate budgeting. EBIDA strikes again.
They purchased the company because they were successful and will then proceed to kill the company by doing the exact opposite things that made them successful.
I hate this trend. Because successful as a business that sustains itself and success as part of a portfolio are different and the latter version of success is always less human, less interesting, just less.
I'm not sure why that's hard to believe. For most of those 150 years, Anchor had a sector of the market to itself. But there are 9,552 craft breweries in the US today, and several hundred of them are quite excellent.
Similarly, I remember the Snowbirds and Carpetbaggers excitement over the Yuengling brewery in Florida. Folks bringing cases home on trips.
Something about those old times regional beers with “no taste” fascinates me as much if not more than all the craft ones. Like drinking a time capsule being able to relate with someone from an oddly specific time and place.
i really liked 2013 deschutes. i actually still think their older beers are good. mirror pond is still, imo, the quintessential pale ale. i miss chainbreaker. and the red chair was always a nice seasonal treat.
i can't blame them for trying to chase trends, but my impression is their distribution was too large to be able to capitalize on anything groundbreaking.
One of the large contributing factors to the rise in Deschutes during that time was due to their investment in technology because of their newly appointed Brewmaster "Brian Faivre" a computer science grad from UC Davis. While I never met him I saw the result of his and many others who championed consistency and quality via data collection about their production process. This dude was essentially scared away due to internal politics.
>but my impression is their distribution was too large to be able to capitalize on anything groundbreaking.
The distribution is all through large distributors Deschutes and every other "Largish" craft brewery has to sell their soul to the devil that is the "three tiered" system in order to not have to make investments in solo distribution. Given what I know about their production facility and the people there. It is completely geared to cash in on basically any beer trend that could exist. Their pilot plant is simply ridiculous, it's a fully automated 40 bbl split wort A/B testing powerhouse. The best beer you've never tasted has been made in that thing.
IMO Deschutes made many decisions that just ended up being a waste of money that severely crippled their cash position.
Lastly trends in the beer world are a flash in the pan at this point. I disregard Seltzers because it's a different process that doesn't directly involve wort production and therefore many craft breweries aren't set up to pivot to such a product.
One thing I attempted to stoke (not that this was at all my job) while working their is that marketing strategy should shift towards understanding that no consumer is loyal in the sense they always want to "try the new thing". This would have meant investments in better variety packing capabilities. If you didn't know variety packs are the highest velocity product, and my guess would be that any brewery that people think is good at all it's their highest velocity product as well. Time and time again I'd raise my hand and point to the metoric number for our variety packs (from a velocity stand point) and say "why can't we make investments that greatly bring down the cost and increase the production velocity for this product. Now you see brands like 10 barrel, Sierra Nevada basically doing just that.
Sure, I oversaw their data historian and was a production analyst for their manufacturing facility in Bend. It is perhaps the most technologically advanced brewery systems currently.
From a manufacturing standpoint that isn't saying much, but from a brewing standpoint it's saying quite a lot.
Quite plainly they are making a bet on bringing NA beverage production in house and they can't pay me because "fresh" market conditions are squeezing them (pun intended).
There are multiple factors that make it really difficult to be a craft beer manufacturer. Primary of which is the three tiered system on distribution, this has been a blight on the beer industry for decades and isn't new.
Other trends such as a decrease in consumption of beer overall in combination with a HIGHLY saturated market place will pretty much seal the deal for the majority of mid-tier breweries that DO NOT have a loyal following.
I never signed an NDA so if you want to know more about my job ask away.
There is definitely a market for craft soda, it’s just hard to get the same or even a small percentage of the distribution. The 2 cola companies have done a great job of pushing other competition out.
I wish this wasn't the case. I am not a big soda drinker, but I had a place near me that carried a variety of different colas and they were very unique an many were delicious.
> "Anchor Brewing will no longer make its iconic holiday beer, Christmas Ale. The spice-laden winter warmer has been a brewing tradition since 1975 and something that Northern California beer lovers look forward to every November."
Fritz Maytag was a pioneer of the microbrewery ("craft beer" hadn't been coined yet) industry and took a small struggling brewery and turned it around. Oh, and saved a beer style from extinction.
Licenses, certifications, shipping, marketing, local distributor management, etc. is all extra overhead when dealing out of state makes your beer cost more compared to selling it locally. And when selling outside of California accounts for 30% of sales it might not be worth the effort.
I think the "kills beloved beer" in the headline refers to the fifth paragraph of the article which says: "Anchor Brewing will no longer make its iconic holiday beer, Christmas Ale."
Too costly to produce, too much competition, insufficient demand outside California. A loss for sure but with so much competition I doubt it will be missed by many.
I have the hardest time finding Liberty ale in the US. Used to love it in Europe as one of the first craft beers along with Sierra Nevada. I still think both stand as real classics. If I had to just drink one beer for the rest of my life it’d be that. Sometimes I just want a good beer without grappling with wild yeasts and exotic hops and wills abvs.
It’s weird that there’s a whole culture around all these craft beers that seems interesting to me but every time I drink anything labeled beer or ale or whatever it is, I feel hot and am basically overcome with a berserker rage (I don’t know how else to explain it, I get really agitated and feel like I’m in flight or fight and want to fight, and it’s like my brain is on fire) within minutes of drinking any sort of beer. The next day I’ll often have a sort of tremor for hours in the morning and minor neurological issues where I have a hard time lifting a glass of water to drink and sober up.
Ciders and liquors don’t cause this issue. I tried a gluten free beer at the insistence of coworkers and a similar thing happened. It just makes me hulk out.
Anyone have any idea why? I figure I’ve got to be allergic to something but I don’t really have any idea what that something might be.
If it's because of the hops, you will probably have less of a reaction if you drink a sour beer, which typically have a lot less hops. You could give that a try as a partition test. You might be able to find a Lambic or Gose at the supermarket, they're reasonably commonplace.
The Gruit style contains no hops at all, but it's uncommon.
