Have we hit a million different beer brands yet? I don’t mean The House, specifically, but the
world over. Has the number of commercial
beer brands with a distinct name, recipe, brewer, etc. reached seven
figures? I don’t know whose job it is to
keep track of this stuff, but we must have by now, right? When you consider all the brewers & all
the beers they put out, including year-round, seasonal rotation, one-offs,
pub-only, etc., we can’t have not hit one million distinct brews conceived
& born. On a whim, I just now looked
up Troegs on BeerAdvocate. They have 225
documented beers, & I’m sure there are probably a few missing. That’s one of three thousand-ish in this
country, at this moment, so yeah, a million seems very possible.
225 different beers.
Okay, so Troegs has been around a while.
Wicked Weed’s newer, let’s check them out. 186!
Four Seasons is just over a year old, let’s try them. Ten.
Okay, that’s surmountable (though again, that’s assuming that every beer
has been entered).
There are many, many choices. Our current stock is in the range of
1300-1400 brands, but that just doesn’t have the same ring as “House of 1000
Beers”, so we round down. If you factor
in seasonals & single releases, bottle & draft, it’s likely that the
number of beers passing through our establishment annually is double that
estimate. That kind of selection can
lead to consumer paralysis, a paradox of choice. There’s so much to choose from, I’ll stick
with my tried-&-true. Josh Bernstein
gave voice to this dilemma in a Bon
Appetit article that gained some traction earlier this year. Can’t venture outside, too scary. Why pick this one, or these six, & hope
they’re better than the other hundreds I’m passing over? Courage, friend! There’s plenty of guidance to be had – just
ask a buddy, or the web, or one of our friendly, knowledgeable staff.
Another product of this hyper-variety is the “ticker”
mentality: the completist, the consummate collector, ever searching out
something new. Dare not drink the same
beer twice – there are Untappd badges to be had! “Hmm, I’ve had Hop Devil, Hop Stoopid, Hop
Juju, Hoptimum, Hoptimus Prime, Hop Henge, Hop Nosh, Hop Head Red… What’s that?
Hop Stalker? Hello!” “Yeah, the rum barrel-aged one was good, but
I had the rum barrel-aged with scorpion peppers & brett down at Fat Head’s
during Craft Beer Week & it was the shit.”
I get both excited & exhausted by this kind of pursuit, & have
all but stopped pining for the deeper & more elusive niches brewers carve. Although, never say never…
America’s craft renaissance is still in its adolescence,
& I wonder if we’ll see a decline in breweries putting out scores of
different beers & variations a year.
I kind of love that The Alchemist has achieved a pretty meteoric rise on
the back of one beer. If he wanted to,
John Kimmich could probably brew & sell Heady alone into an early
retirement. The European model seems to
be much more conservative in line-up; to my limited perception, most European
brewers (save for the ones borne by the western craft boom like Nogne O, for
instance) release between one & six beers, period. Maybe my provincialism is showing & there
are way more European brewers doing a ton of one-offs, but it seems to me that
the European example locks in a few styles & brands & does them
consistently well. Imagine if every
American brewer whittled down their portfolio to single digits & did that
handful really well – there would still be thousands & thousands of great,
domestically made beers available.
Part of me wonders if that’s where we’re headed, would be
curious to see that future, & truth be told, wouldn’t mind. There’s just too much to keep track of right
now; I could have a selection of thousand beers for life & be perfectly
happy. And then I remember – this is
America. We like choice & novelty as
much as quality. It keeps the game
interesting. I have to remind myself,
too, that American craft brewing is essentially home brewing writ large. Randy Mosher’s definition of craft beer: “If
a homebrew (current or former) gets to decide what the beer tastes like, it’s
craft beer”. Home brewers always having
something going – this is in the fermenter, this is in secondary, I’m working
on a recipe for this. Part of the
essence of American craft brewing is the individual doing what they want &
then sharing it with others, & constantly taking on some challenge, doing
something new. Sometimes they want to do
it all at the same time, & it becomes a trend, like I’d mentioned in the
case of “session” IPA. But good luck
trying to tell them to tone it down. The
craft brewers may come to the paring down conclusion on their own,
eventually. Or maybe not. For now, though, there’s still a lot of
exploring to do.
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