The Existential Question for Craft Beer
Craft beer is becoming the new paradigm for beer but one nagging question still persists: How much better is it than regular beer?
Nobody wants their hobby to become the next hipster hobby. I remember in the early aughts, before the concept of the modern hipster had come to fully form, it felt like people were purposefully choosing hobbies as obscure and as obfuscated as possible. The more complex and off-the-radar the better. However misguided, choosing a hobby in this manner seemed to offer a shortcut to seeming like you had some distinguishable expertise or particular perspicacity—how could one verify your expertise if one had no experience with the subject at hand—and consequently, this—in theory—would offer a shortcut to gaining some delusional yet clearly powerful vision of social cachet. This sounds pretty stupid right now but at the time, hobby choosing like this powered the lifestyle decision making of the modern hipster of the aughts—a significant social phenomenon whose ethos still reverberates in culture.
For their sins, most of these perceived-to-be-hipster hobbies of the aughts (obscure films, complex music, big wordy novels, fixed gear bikes, cheap beer, the desire to find and like something before it became popular only to deride it once it became popular) didn’t just die off naturally as most hobbies tend to do. It seems rather that they were beaten, murdered and dragged through the metaphorical streets of the internet as admonishment for what would happen if something were ever again liked without reasonable justification to the culture at large or if something were ever again liked sheerly for the sake of how liking it would look to others.
Of course, what followed and what currently persists isn’t so much a set of better, more reasonable hobbies. Rather what exists are hobbies (comic book adaptations, beer, food, basketblogging, hypebeast culture) that can be just as arcane and secret-handshakey and structured like echo chambers as the hobbies of the recent past.
Probably my favorite beer of all time is Faction Brewing’s Anomaly White Chocolate Milk Stout. Here’s how the good people at Faction, based in San Mateo, CA, describe it:
Faction Anomaly Milk Stout is made with star anise, Tcho chocolates cacao nibs in Berkeley, lactose sugar & coffee from Roast Co. in West Oakland. Made to taste like a stout but having the appearance of a pale ale. Served on nitro for the ultimate experience of this sweet “stout”.
When you’re first poured a glass of Anomaly, the novelty is apparent. You ordered a stout and what’s been slid your way could not possibly be a stout. It’s got that burnt out orange-amber glow that could be anything but the stark blackness of a stout. Then, despite the bartender’s protestations of having served you the incorrect beer, you warily take a sip, your palette bracing itself for the sort of shout-in-the-distance hoppiness you’ve come to expect from pale ales. However, what manifests itself on your palette is far from this. And this is where the novelty gets you, where expectations are defied in a good, constructive way. Your mind expects a mundane pale ale but what you get is in fact an obscenely delicious stout. It’s a stout that delivers an extremely well balanced flavor experience: chocolate but not too much chocolate, some star anise but not obnoxiously overwhelmed with the spice and just enough coffee to give a grounding bitter texture to the sweetness on hand. It manages the miracle of being a sweet beer that never tires you out. It’s a beer with the admirable artifice of say a great double IPA with the casual drinkability of say a Boddingtons or Guinness or, jesus, a Budweiser.
However, what I think I like most about it is how readily apparent the value of its flavor experience is. It’s a flavor bomb for sure, but it’s first and foremost always a beer. It’s not the kind of stout where you drink it, taste the chocolate or the coffee and think, “That was nice but if I wanted to taste chocolate or taste coffee, why didn’t I just buy a chocolate bar or a cup of coffee?” The only way you can obtain this experience—a unique and likable flavorful experience—is through drinking the beer.
I say this because too frequently, at least for me, craft beer seems to ignore this idea in its flavor experience, seeming to favor description over explanation. “What does this beer taste like?” is important to the experience but it’s not the all-serving question. The follow-up question of “Why does the beer tasting this way provide a unique and valuable experience?” is too rarely asked and/or too rarely answered. When craft beer fails to address the latter, it can produce one of the two following experiences:
- The beer serves as a mere delivery vessel for flavors that can be obtained more simplistically or more straightforwardly and/or better elsewhere, or…
- The beer offers a flavor experience so inscrutable to the palette that it makes one wonder whether she/he would have been better off ordering its cheaper, mass produced and/or more mainstream equivalent.
For the latter, I imagine the seasoned craft beer enthusiast’s response would entail some urging to continue introducing your palette to more and different beers. Not every beer is for you. It’s perfectly reasonable to suggest the possibility that as you encounter more beers in your epicurean pursuit and come to appreciate the artisanship behind making the craft beers, you’ll eventually get to the point where you’ll come to understand what you like and what you don’t like. You’ll come to crave beers that cater to your specific sensibilities and you’ll come to loathe the flat, seemingly one-note experiences delivered by their more mainstream equivalents.
Yet the question persists: How long does it take to get to this elevated level of epicurean sentience? I’ve been drinking craft beer with varying degrees of interest for over five years now and I feel no closer to understanding the value of the flavor experience of most craft beers. I’ve drank somewhere between 500 to 1,000 different craft beers in my lifetime and I’d say maybe ten delivered memorable, hobby-justifying flavor experiences. The rest were either inoffensive and forgettable or pure plain bad, leaving me to wonder if the payoff—if there even is an obtainable payoff—is worth the pursuit.
Last October, GQ on its website hosted an interesting sort of quick fire debate regarding the legitimacy of crappy beer vs the legitimacy of good beer. On the side of crappy beer was David Chang, founder of the Momofuku restaurant group and one of the best chefs and restauranteurs in the world. On the side of good beer was Garrett Oliver, popular and lauded brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery.
For years I've watched craft-beer aficionados go on about their triple-hopped IPAs and cocoa-flavored English milk…www.gq.com
Dear Dave, I'm a little worried about you. I mean, it was funny for a while. Like the time you told me in your…www.gq.com
Chang’s argument:
- “Beer snobs are the worst of the bunch.”
- Ninety-five percent of the time, he does not want a “tasty beer”.
- “Maybe it goes back to my childhood. I remember watching my grandfather mow the lawn on a ninety-degree day in Virginia, and as soon as he finished, he’d ask me to fetch him a can of ice-cold beer. He’d tell me, “One day, you’ll understand what it’s like to drink a really cold beer when you’ve earned it.”’
- Shitty beer, like champagne, pairs better with food than tasty beer.
Oliver’s response:
- Miller High Life is nasty.
- Everyone has nostalgia for crappy beer. That doesn’t mean they still drink it.
- “Could I still murder a bag of White Castle cheeseburgers at midnight? Hells yeah! But I don’t go telling Danny Meyer about it every time I see him. White Castle is nostalgic, but Shake Shack burgers make me stupid with happiness. Now I can have a few nice things, and I like it that way. I respect industrial beer, but I don’t have to drink it anymore.”
- Chang, a world renown chef and purveyor of unique, rare, hard-to-achieve, hard-to-find tastes, is a hypocrite when he denounces the “epicurean snob set”.
It’s funny, in Chang’s argument, you’ll find an unavoidable hyperawareness of beer’s multifarious place in the world of hipster hobbies. In one instance, Chang seems to rip on people with neck beards who argue about hop varieties, implying the portrait of the yuppier version of a today’s hipster. In another instance, Chang is quick to disabuse anyone of the notion that he likes crappy beer for the sake of gaining some nebulous notion of cred, implying the younger, superficially rough-around-the-edges, potentially poorer (or secretly richer) version of today’s hipster, when he says, “I want a Bud Light. I am not being falsely contrarian or ironic in a hipsterish way.”
It makes me wonder what is not a hipster move in this situation. Drink crappy beer? Hipster. Drink fancy craft beer? Neck beard AND it almost goes without saying: hipster. In order to seem cool under this rubric, do you have to, like, drink a crappy beer and then when someone asks you about it, pretend like the bartender gave you the wrong beer? “I was expecting a Mikkeller but I guess I’ll ride for this PBR.” Is traveling back in time and somehow getting adopted by Chang’s family so you too could be told, “One day, you’ll understand what it’s like to drink a really cold beer when you’ve earned it,” the only way to obtain an authentic drinking experience?
Oliver, you can see, goes in hardest for the hypocrisy he sees in Chang’s argument. To Oliver, Chang can’t be the guy who both reps high-end, all-world food stuff like Noma and his own Momofuku, BUT at the same time, dismisses the similarly shaded epicurean logic of the craft beer movement. In some ways, these punches land. Chang knows what good beer is and likes good beer but doesn’t, it seems, like who likes good beer and/or how they go about liking good beer. This is never an argument that can stand up under scrutiny. Oliver clearly comes off as the more persuasive of the two.
However, there’s something disconcerting about the rhetoric being used here—or perhaps, it’s more appropriate to say, the rhetoric that isn’t being used here. Oliver tries to convey his idea through an analogy, comparing crappy beer to White Castle and good beer to Shake Shack. It’s an effective analogy, somewhat. But where it fails is in its presumption that good beer is actually analogous to good food. Because, well, is good beer analogous to good food?
Good food, for the most part, makes its quality readily apparent. Shake Shack’s not necessarily my paragon for great burgers but there’s no doubting its quality and there’s no escaping its flavor and the way it resonates when you eat a Shake Shack burger. Like good sushi vs bad sushi, the difference in quality between a Shake Shack burger and a White Castle burger is apparent and definably persuasive.
With craft beer, I’m not so sure. There are different flavors and different sensations at work with craft beer but I don’t necessarily know if this translates to being automatically better than regular beer. Here you can see a glint of reason and persuasion in Chang’s argument. Because for most people, myself included, bad beer doesn’t necessarily taste bad. As many people will tell you, the quality of beer is about the moment in which you drink it and about the people with whom you drink it. This is super corny but seems pretty reasonable once you cleave off the sentimentality. If the quality of beer is determined more by context than by its substance then what’s the point of all the artisanship? Yeah, you can taste star anise and fancy chocolate and fancy coffee beans in your beer but does this translate to tasting better or merely tasting different. I don’t know.
And “I don’t know” is the point here. This isn’t an attempt to bring down or maliciously deride the craft beer movement. In fact, there are a lot of reasons to root for its success. The people involved are good for the most part. The sense of local pride is positive for our overall concept of community. The sense of craft and the desire to create a sort of drinkable art is well-intentioned. Its sense of being a small but increasingly threatening player in a market dominated by large corporations like InBev is admirable. This isn’t about taking all these seemingly good things and replacing them in your head with an imaginary neckbearded strawman hipster turning her/his nose up to you because you don’t know the difference between a pale ale and an IPA. Look, in 2013, 16 million barrels of Budweiser, which has been steadily losing market share, were shipped compared to 16.1 million barrels of craft beer. This isn’t even a question about whether or not craft beer has a bright future or not. It does. This is about asking craft beer a simply stated but difficult-to-contemplate (but worthwhile) question that if answered reasonably and emphatically enough, can extricate it from the confines of its insular hipster hobby foundation, help stave off any populist-driven backlash that should be coming any day now and consequently, give it the opportunity to transcend its niche roots into something more permanent and logical. To no longer be craft beer but just beer.
