By: Adam Bereznicki
First-Year Brewmaster Student
To be honest, even I had a brief flash of giddy excitement when I more closely inspected this sour ale (brewed with fruity breakfast cereal and edible glitter). After all, drinking craft beer so often means looking for new and exciting products. That feeling quickly subsided as my inner pessimist came out, and I found myself asking “how have we fallen so far?”
First-Year Brewmaster Student
Like many of my classmates and fellow craft beer enthusiasts, I find myself often casually scrolling through social media, searching for new beer releases from a multitude of my favourite breweries. Recently, however, I came across a picture that stopped my scrolling in its tracks. It was an advertisement for a new beer, of course, but not just any new beer. The label on the can featured a swirling background of sky-blue and lilac, with bold red lettering highlighted by a unicorn and a rainbow. As gaudy as the appearance of the packaging was, more shocking were the contents of a small glass next to it – a hazy, orange liquid filled with swirling motes of glitter.
Yes, glitter.
Perhaps that thought may be a bit dramatic, but many like myself feel the trend towards ever more wilder and increasingly bizarre brews may be a sign of a genuine problem in our industry. The constant demand on breweries, especially small or inexperienced ones, to rapidly produce new and varied beers has led to a sort of saturation of creative potential. New ideas may always seem like a good thing, but when brewers are pressured to continuously create unique one-off beers to satisfy a meandering customer base, it is quality and integrity that suffers. More than once it has been rumoured that a brewery's latest batches of hazy NEIPA’s are essentially the same beer, tweaked ever so slightly from previous versions.
Of course, you don’t have to take it from me. A recent article on VinePair titled Note to Craft Beer Fans: ‘It’s O.K. to Drink the Same Beer Twice’ spoke to Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø, owner of the renowned Evil Twin brewing company. With regards to the constant demand for new beer, which it is important to note he is not immune to (Evil Twin added 108 new beers to its repertoire in 2018) he says, “I think it’s hurting the creativity in some ways, because it seems like the intensiveness of ‘new new new’ forces breweries to just slap new labels on stuff they have made before instead of spending the time and energy on actually creating something new, or making what they already do better”. He goes on to say, “the beer nerds sometimes seem to be more into ‘new’ than ‘good,’ […]I think it’s easier for breweries these days to sell new mediocre beer than already available great beer!”
If this is true, then indeed we owe it to our favourite brewers to ease up on our constant demand for new products, starting with supporting their core products. If we don’t, we might end up creating a beer culture where Instagram-worthiness and fads replace quality brewing. After all, a glitzy, glamorous looking pint may appear oh-so-tantalizing, but then so did Pandora’s box.
Adam Bereznicki is a first-year brewmaster student in the 6th cohort.