Promethium Wrote:
Kingfish Wrote:
I kind of feel like we need to stop the influx of new breweries. La has had like 5 new breweries open in the last year and they all basically suck. The world has enough shitty beer - we don't need inexperienced kids with no career prospects or talent making passion fruit infused beer for no other reason than no one else has made this shitty beer before.
I tend to agree with you, since I haven't really been all that impressed by the products of the new breweries popping up through out the Great Plains, but then again it takes a while to hone your craft.
I know a lot of home brewers that make tremendous beers, but they could never succeed at operating a brewery. They make beer for other brewers, and don't necessarily want to make beer for the folks who will make their brewery a success.
You or I might not like the beer from the new breweries in our region, but they might be making beer for a market that we don't belong to or really understand.
I don't really see the harm in trying a beer or two from a crappy local craft brewery in order to get the best available products in the long run. Sometimes it takes supporting a couple bad local brewers in order for the local beer scene to grow exponentially and attract brewers from outside the area to distribute their products here.
Also, it seems a little hypocritical to bash local breweries for making experimental beers, when a brewery like Dogfish Head is rewarded for beer archaeology. Did they really need to make a Chile beer based on pottery fragments from Honduras? Probably not, but it turned out to be a damn fine beer, and it inspires folks to brew something different, which is the main reason behind making a passion fruit infused beer.
Well, I equally dislike Dogfish's fruit/spice infused beers (And Abita's awful strawberry beers which is basically wine coolers for men). But I can agree that Dogfish's seem to be at least well-crafted even if I don't like em.
However, I think people don't really understand how experimentation really works. In my opinion, to effectively experiment (not just in beer but in general), you have to understand how the process works and understand the conventions of your craft. Then you're breaking rules with a purpose and possibly creating some really great new stuff. If you're just throwing shit in a pot with a rudimentary knowledge of the craft, then it's just amatuerish.
To borrow from cooking, Feran Adria didn't just start buying a bunch of industrial food additives and start playing around. I'm pretty sure he learned how to cook first. Learned how to be a traditional chef and then started breaking rules and seeing what happened if ....
That's my problem the sudden influx of everyone having their own brewery. I know some of the people who have started a brewery here. One person has as much experience as I do, which is none. And his beer tastes like it. And that criticism isn't limited to experimental beers, it applies to their beers in general because their conventional beers suck equally as bad.
It seems like all you need these days to have a brewery is a cool name and a cool label. What's actually in the bottle is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
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