Give me cheap beer, or give me sobriety. Just stop this craft beer 'revolution'
|
Version 0 of 1. Is the craft beer “revolution” over yet? For the past four or five years I’ve been plaintively asking this question in the same tone as a toddler in the back seat. Now it seems that every time I head to the pub I’m confronted by a row of hand-whittled taps. My pleas are becoming more desperate. Craft beer is easy to hate. Most of it tastes bad. Beer snobs are phenomenally irritating, often even worse than the narky farmers’ market set or the paleo herd. Hops connoisseurs are so annoying that there are published guides on how not to be one, but the guides themselves contain bits like this: Related: What craft beer can teach the brewery big boys Also, lager has had its good name besmirched by a long association with shitty American macrobrews, all of which have to be lagers, and all of which would be just as gross if they were ales. Such is the power of snobbery that in the course of explaining how not to be a “beer asshole,” the writer refers to beers he doesn’t like as shitty and gross. Co-organiser of last year’s Sip & Savour beer tasting, Michael Ward, described the event as “a chance to really learn about beer – about craft beer that is, not the mass-produced drain water that goes by the same name.” Case closed, beer nerds. But the worst part is that craft beer is un-Australian. We have a fairly specific kind of beer drinking culture, and it’s ill at ease with the kind of mouth-puckering, overly flavoursome beers favoured by the crafty set. When I go to the pub I want to talk to my friends about their lives, our jobs, politics, funny things we saw on public transport that day. Ward says that “craft beer is a conversation”, which really gets to the heart of the matter: I don’t want to have a conversation with my beer, I want to have a conversation with my mates. Combined with our loose culture of buying rounds, this “beer-as-backdrop” phenomenon is why it’s important for tap beers to be sessionable and relatively inexpensive. Beer blogger Martyn Cornell’s exploration of sessionability pinpoints the crucial difference between a “craft beer” kind of beer and what I, from an Australian perspective, would call a “normal beer”: What makes a good session beer is a combination of restraint, satisfaction and ‘moreishness’. Like the ideal companions around a pub table, a great session beer will not dominate the occasion and demand attention; at the same time its contribution, while never obtrusive, will be welcome, satisfying and pleasurable ... Some craft beers fit this bill, but many are demanding in flavour and overly hoppy. Their chunderous aftertaste leaves you with room-clearing beer breath and no desire to go back for a second drink. I’m not alone in this opinion. David Chang, founder of the Momofuku restaurant group and cheap beer enthusiast, gets it: I don’t want to have a conversation with my beer, I want to have a conversation with my mates. See, when a waiter asks me what I want to drink, I respond, ‘What is your lightest, crappiest beer?’ I’m very direct about my preference. [...] I am not being falsely contrarian or ironic in a hipsterish way. This is something that I genuinely feel: I do not want a tasty beer. They’re also expensive, which means the price of finding one that doesn’t taste like licking a compost heap is too damn high (unless someone is giving them to you for free, which should be the only legal form of beer evangelism). This point can be lost on craft beer nerds, who are either higher income earners or so obsessed with their beer hobby that they can’t imagine why anyone would pay less exacting attention to the fizzy brown stuff they drink to give themselves a buzz. Order a VB or a Reschs around one of these people (or worse, buy them one) and expect them to drink it, and you’re at a high risk of having the entire discussion become a beer education session. Since it’s become more socially acceptable to drink craft beer, the incidence of these hostile conversational takeovers has increased exponentially. If beer snobbery were perceived as a bit weird, like cheese enthusiasm or wine appreciation, we wouldn’t have this problem. Everyone drinking $4 schooners of freezing cold classless bitter would be free to talk about other things, all of them far more interesting. Craft beer culture must die, or at least stop taking over all the pubs where I like to go. If it were contained to its own small bars where I never drink, it’d just be another niche subculture, where it belongs. Instead, it’s being relentlessly hand-pumped down our throats. Give me cheap beer, or give me sobriety. |