Post by Maalii on Oct 19, 2004 18:29:14 GMT -5
generaldu said:
The yeast I can do is thank Maali for his explanation of the current beer situation. I am still hopful that things will change for the better.Actually the situation has improved in leaps and bounds from 25 years ago. As of then we had virtually no "microbrews", and our big brewers (as they still do) offered us only innumerable small variations on the theme of adjunct-laden (ie substituting large proportions of other fermentables for malted barley), hop-deprived, beer that they claimed was some imitation of a Pilsner. Now, here in the SF Bay Area, we may have a horribly unreliable Korean TV station (grrrrrrrr), but not too much work is necessary to gain access to literally hundreds of different high-quality brews from West Coast small breweries (as well as a huge selection of good imports). Will the situation continue to improve? Yes, to a point. We continue to see more new small breweries open up and the public expects much higher quality now, so only the better ones survive (this applies to food as well as beer offered at brewpubs), whereas 15 years ago, the novelty of a brewpub was enough to draw in customers (some pretty bad beer was poured from some of those establishments in those days). In spite of this, the overall market share of super high end brew like this continues to be below 5% with no sign of it increasing significantly. As visible as Sierra Nevada is on the West Coast and as visible as Sam Adams is on the East and as many superb micros as we have across the nation, collectively the sales of such beer is still a very small fraction of the total domestic beer market. In the meantime the societal trend toward light everything, and low carb this and that---ie less flavor, less body, less everything--sells, and this will continue to impede the large scale popularity of high quality beer. But I think the key is choice. 25 years ago we had few beer options in this country. Now, most of us living near major cities, or those of us in microbrew havens (such as the West Coast States) have abundant choice, and I think that is what is most important. We don't really care if the other 95% goes along with us, as long as WE have our choice. Twenty plus years ago, I used to be embarassed when I was hosting foreign beer-drinking scholars from countries with great brewing traditions (such as the UK, Belgium, Germany). In the mid 80's I'd take such folks to specialty pubs that featured a good list of high quality imports with some emerging micros. Now I wouldn't think of having a foreign guest/friend drink what they could get better in the UK or Germany, I'd much rather take them to a place where they can drink some super hoppy West Coast Ale that they could never find in Europe. Yes, things have improved a lot.