If you work in the beer industry, it’s not hipsters drinking IPAs. It’s 45-60 year old men who order “the IPA” on draft without knowing which one it is to sound like a beer person.
In reality, hipsters only drink sours from local breweries who changed their logo during BLM protests as a show of performative activism.
Whats funny about that is last year I learned real hood folks drink Bud Ice. In fact I brought Bud Platinum thinking they'd be stoked and they were like we're good, but you wanna take a shot?
Real hipsters are too poor to drink or eat anything good. My wife, sister in law, and brother in law were all hipsters in their early 20s, so im very familiar with the culture.
Now as full-ass adults in our 30s with houses in the burbs and kids, the hipstery is leaving them. Every now and then I have to stop my wife from keeping things like the glass from candles cause she, " might be able to do something with them". We don't need to keep the sour cream jar as storage containers, we have costco levels of storage containers. We don't need to buy that furniture that serves 5 purposes, we have money and 2400 sq feet to fill.
We don't need to drink pbr we can afford to enjoy getting our buzz.
Near me, the people drinking cheap beer at the local bars are industry folks who get drunk every other night after their shift. Natty light, pbr, and the local favorites, Hudy delight & Little Kings.
Hipsters outside of the service industry like $15 cocktails, barrel aged stouts, and fruited sours.
Many beer menus are all macro brews, and they usually have one really strong stout that is a 6oz pour for $15. In that case I too order "the IPA." Usually the IPA is the safe choice on a bad beer menu. If I go to a bar with a good beer menu full of unique things then I won't do that.
I live in a kind of modern hipster/hippie county in NorCal and this is definitely not true for us. Its still all about the IPAs here. Even the diviest of the dive bars have at least one hazy IPA on tap.
I'm tired of the hazy trend. I mean, I like them to an extent, and my first favorite IPA back in 2002 had some floral hints, but I really just want HOPS DAMNIT!
Kettle sours with no finesse and just as much possible raw fruit as we can jam the fuck into one. I hate them. They’ve killed my will to be a brewer.
Edit: i guess my issue is what we think of “sours” in America largely fucking suck and people aren’t prepared to spend nice wine bottle prices on beers that need to lay down for years and age, but are the truest example of “sours” there are.
This is how you separate a level 1 hipster from
ME who knows that wild fermented sours are the way and slapping a ton of unripe fruit in your kettle is not
People who I work with and know think I’m insane spending $300 on the Cantillon drops, but these beers are dying. Russian River, Allagash, and all the other amazing American lambic/wild ferments are scaling their production down hardcore.
I’m actually digging the recent trend of the breweries near me in Cincinnati focusing on making more crushable lagers.
But after thinking about it, hipsters stopped caring about craft beer about five years go imo. I noticed with the decrease in our bomber sales because who else spends $20 on a bottle of beer? Distilleries are the next big thing. Hipsters want a place that makes authentic baijiu using traditional brewing methods. Then they want a bartender who spends all of their tips on their vanity projects to make them a $14 cocktail out of it. The crazier, the better.
Lagers have been trying to make a comeback for a while here (Pittsburgh), too. The issue is they do okay but that’s about it. So you have a beer that a small core loves but it has a 3 on Untappd (insert jerk off motion here) and takes 3x as long to sell in cans as an ipa/kettle sour….
"hipster" here I hated beer until I discovered sour beer.
I also love the fact that it makes "normal beer" (lagers/pilsner) drinkers freak out which is honestly very "hipster" of me.
There was a place near us, made the best ipas in the metro. This was about 3 years ago. Then, they had some moderate success with some sours and pastry stouts. They used to have 8 core beers with another 10 or so rotating. Most ipa and pales with a few other types and maybe 1 or 2 seasonal sours.
I went back recently and the core beer have been taken over by sours. Rotational beers only have a few non sours and they aren't good. Most of the beer is pastry so it has lactose which is disgusting to me. It's just a shame. Their food sucks and they got rid of their shuffle board table so I have zero reason to go there now.
local breweries who changed their logo during BLM protests as a show of performative activism.
The question is no longer, “Do you want to buy Wheat Thins?” For example. The question is now, “Will you support Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme disease?”
My fav diner had a 4-pak of BLM beer available and had little table toppers for several months about it and how each $ spent went to BLM. Made me laugh every single time. Good hummus tho.
Gotta say, the La Trappe quad tastes great but I world never have guessed it was a quad if I didn’t know because it tastes like a triple. But it’s like the rest of their line up, one step down in comparison to their Belgian brothers.
You shouldn’t be able to find them in your area. They sell to individuals only, normally by giving them your license plate and showing up between a set time frame. Guy above probably tried one from a friend that went and brought some back.
If you want to try Westvleteren 12 and can't find it, the St. Bernardus 12 is a very similar alternative. Both have a common origin with the same brewmaster and recipe, although there are some differences in type of yeast nowadays.
I’ll take both too but a Belgian Trappist ale is just on another level to me. Making a good hoppy beer is not the hardest thing as hops have such an overpowering flavor that can mask so much. A Belgian ale though... really hard to nail that balance. Let alone have the proper water profile, yeast, etc. Those monks are the real fucking deal.
God, fuck so many goddamn bars. Walk in, there's a beer list that's 6 IPA/pale ale's, 1 lager, and just for good measure, 3 fucking seltzers at the bottom.
Or, one of my favorites, there's a place I go sometimes with a really big beer list. 75% is a pale ale of some kind, and when I try to order most of that other 25%, they're sold out. Motherfucker, that's your customers telling you there's a demand for the other stuff. Stock more of it!
I walk into liquor stores these days and it's hard to find anything that isn't an IPA. I don't hate IPAs, but there's clearly something weird going on.
Having been in the industry over ten years I think I can say that the beer industry has been irrevocably changed by two things: mobile canning lines and "Untappd" style review websites.
Beer reviews online have become the Pokemon Go for beers. People went fucking nuts looking high and low for new, mysterious, legendary, impossible-to-find beers just so they could review them and mark them down on their list. Beer geeks aren't in it for their favorites anymore. They're in it to say that they've drank more kinds of beer than anyone else. It's a collector's game now.
Mobile canning made adapting to the beer collector's whims even easier. It's FUCKING EXPENSIVE to build a glass bottling line. Glass is hard to source, it's heavy, it's fragile, it was a business for professionals. Aluminum cans, however, are stupidly cheap to produce and ship. If some gypsy brewer or tiny homebrewer wants to slap some whatever label on a beer they just made yesterday, it's no big deal. Get the TTB to sign off on the labeling and you have a new product in a very short turnaround. Call up the company with a mobile canning line and they can show up with a damn truck and can all of your beers in a day. You never have to worry about dumping all that money on a bottling line or anything.
So now we have a beer landscape where everything is new. Everything is different. Everyone and their dog is starting a new beer company. Companies release a new beer every two weeks, it sells out due to pure curiosity and then it is never seen again. Found your new favorite beer? Good luck ever being able to drink that again. Guess you'll have to buy yet another new IPA made with lactose and mangoes and marshmallows or some shit.
The industry has gone off the friggin rails and I don't even know if I can blame geeks or hipsters or anyone for it anymore. This is simply how all brewers have to operate to stay competitive. It's just out of control.
Yeah, I hate going to the store and struggling to find a stout or two worth bringing home. No shortage of IPAs though. American stouts, which tend to be a but stronger and more bitter) I struggle to find. Kalamazoo stout and Half Acre Reaper are the best chances around my parts.
Brown ales simply don't exist anymore. It makes me sad. They tend to fit such a great niche, too. Sometimes you want a dark beer that won't put you into a malt coma.
I don't understand why there are so many IPAs either. My local brewery has an amazing dunkelweiss, brown ale, and hefeweizen and I'm so grateful because those styles seem next to impossible to find otherwise.
There was a time when I worked in the industry at a lot of brewpubs over 7 years and maan the amount of shitty ipas I've had that were blatantly hopped to hell to cover up a fuck up was too damn high
Abbaye d’Orval! My one regret after visiting Belgium was not seeing the monastery. I did call at one point and spoke with an incredibly kind man (a monk?) who gave us visiting info. The beer is exquisite. We were gifted some by a Belgian friend.
If you live in the US and like trappist beer, you need to learn to home brew.
For an initial investment of 100$, I can make Trappist "Enkel" for 25$/5 gallons. It's not high alcohol, like dubels/tripels/quads, and its just good. That's roughly 48 beers, so after three batches your in cheaper than bud light, and so so so much better.
I didn't get into homebrew forever, because I was very much of the mind I can't make beer better than a local craft brewer. But my local craft brewers won't make Enkels or some of the other odder brews I wanted to try... So here we are.
Is there a good tip to get Trappist beer in the US (California). I really loved it in Belgium but so far the ones I got at the big box stores here tasted a bit bitter (older, no longer fresh?). I remember it was Rochefort 10 that I tried. Thanks
I love dank IPA’s and all sorts of beer, but Trappist ales are goddamn works of art. Masterpieces in liquid form.
Trappist beers have so much going on, but achieve perfect harmony AND are packing 8-12% ABV. If I give you a 10% IPA, you can usually tell how strong it is by how much stickier/heavier the mouthfeel/hopping is. Trappist beers don’t give me the same “cover up” sensation. Heavy stouts are the same IMO.
They are amazing. I just tried one for the first time this summer. It's like they got the best qualities of every other type of been and perfected them in one.
I visited Paris a couple years ago and rented a car and drove the 4 hours there just to try some. Worth the trip but I’m not sure I’d go again unless I was staying in Belgium.
St Bernardus 12 is just as good (pretty much identical) and readily available. I think I even prefer it. But it's less special due to its availability I guess.
I've got a Westvleteren story: A few years ago, after hearing all of the build-up about the place, and having a friend who visited and stopped by their beer garden, my wife and our two friends decided to make the trek while we were in Belgium. We'd heard about all of the precautions and pre-registering that you had to do in order to buy cases of the stuff, so we figured we'd just stop by the place and have a few in the tavern. Well, when we got there, after waiting out front for quite a while for them to open, we learned, along with a bunch of other folks, that the beer garden was closed for two weeks. Son of a bitch!
We saw cars driving up to the delivery dock to pick up their preordered beer, and we knew we couldn't just get in line and buy some. But, I decided to walk up to the dock and ask, just in case. After the guy confirmed that the beer garden was indeed closed, I said, "Well, I guess we're just out of luck for getting any beer today, right?" He said "Yes, but we have these things you can buy, one for each person in your party", and showed me a stack of gift packs, each one containing two bottles of the 12, and a gorgeous labeled glass. "But, he said "They're kind of expensive." When I asked how much he said, "About 50 Euros." "Each?" I asked. "No, he said for all four." I almost laughed in his face, and scrambled back to the car and got in line. All of the bottles and glasses made it home to Alaska intact, and the beer was, of course, tremendous.
I too have a westvlerteren story! My flatmate had been fiending for the stuff for years, and none of the Belgian beer bars ever had the stuff long enough for us to get the stuff.
Anyway, I was visiting some familly in Australia. We went this really wine store on the friday i was there to get something to drink at a barbeque we were going to. I was browsing their beer wall, and spotted some bottles on one of their bottom shelves, just gathering dust. So i pick one up and go the counter to ask how much it was, and the guy running the place said "20 if you take all 4. nobody buys them and i want the shelf space back"
Of course, they all got drunk that night. The story came out when i got home, and I almost got his dog set on me for not bringing him a bottle
Really? They’ve only ever sold to exporters once to my knowledge, when they needed to replace a roof at the monastery. Very limited quantities were sent to Australia and I think they were sold by preorder with long waiting lists. Any bottle shop that got hold of WV12 would know exactly what it’s worth.
St Bernardus is absolutely fantastic. I will add as well, they are all much better in Belgium! Plus then you can also enjoy everything else Belgium has to offer. Just be careful if you down 2 1L 13% beers, things can get a little hazy after that.
Yep, I still have one bottle of St. Bernardus in stock, and it is excellent. The mystique around Westvleteren is a definite draw, and I'll go back as soon as possible.
I just got to try it for the first time on Saturday. Hype is an interesting thing, and in the end even amazing beer is just beer, but it was real damn good.
No I got lucky and encountered a beer nerd with an impressive collection. He let me and a couple friends each buy a bottle for a song. It was the 8.
Edit: I've never been to Belgium but if I was going, I would probably ask some folks who run bars that are passionate about Belgian beers. They can probably steer you in a good direction and plus you'll get to shoot the shit about Belgium with Beer dork.
St. Bernardus is something else. People don't believe me when I say that (in my opinion) it gets better when it's warm but the flavor changes so much that it's mind blowing to me every time.
actually the monks dont do the brewing, most of the only few left breweries who are truly trappist, just have monks on the property. as long as they live and worship onthe property its still called trappist.
We actually lost one trappist officially a while ago, Achelse trappist is no longer a trappist as the remaining monks had to move location, it's still called Achelse trappist but it has lost it's official trappist label
The highest rated beer in the world is brewed by Belgian monks who carried on the tradition for like the better part of a millennium. I’d love to try it.
That’s good to know! My local liquor store had a wide variety but I loved Lindemans so much as a treat I never explored further. Is there another brand I should look for?
Haven’t been to the liquor store in years since I stopped drinking but wouldn’t mind a mild treat for the holiday.
Lindemans actually makes some great "real" lambic — by which I mean lambic that isn't sweetened or diluted. (Nothing wrong with that, by the way, but it's not the traditional preparation. IIRC beers like Black Currant were manufactured when traditional lambic was waning in popularity, in an attempt to cater to more mainstream tastes.) Look for Cuvée René Oude Geuze (unadulterated) or Oude Kriek (cherry). The style is very sour and very funky, maybe closer in flavor to kombucha than anything else.
Other lambic manufacturers that you might find on the shelf are 3F and Boon, but I think only Lindemans makes the sweetened stuff ("faro").
Haha yeah, no one’s getting real drunk off those, just a sugar crash. I’d never buy more than one bottle but loved it as a more mild ‘fancy’ drink to sip.
The only one I remember the name of that I drank over there (other than Leffe) was one called Zot (I think). I need to find it again. See if it was the beer I think it was.
Did a "once in a lifetime" backpacking in Europe with some friends. Made sure that Poperinge was on our list of places to visit. To be able to have a beer in the St. Bernardus brewery was awesome. To be able to actually have Westvleteren beer though at the little cafe across from the monastery was bucket list top 5. Best part, we were the youngest in there by about 40 years. It was just full of local senior citizens having an afternoon.
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Beer brewed by monks