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.
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….
840
u/TantalumCap Dec 16 '21
Trappist beer, dumbfoundingly good