Lagers. They remain the most popular beer style in the world and no amount of craft beer will ever change that fact. Calling them bland, tasteless or boring means little to the larger beer drinking population who view a pint as a pint and not some sort of weird journey to be documented on an app or social media. It's a cold beer on a hot day, a round with your friends after work or the case you grabbed for the weekend. It's beer, whittled down to what it always was and for the most part is still being consumed for. Social lubrication, relaxation, taking the edge off the rougher parts of our day and generally being part of the background as opposed to the focus of what we are doing. Nobody is doing a tasting experience of Pabst and that's something I have come round on as I leave the proclamations and snarky comments of the Evangelical beer folks behind. I was once there and now I am here, not quite full circle, but coming round on one.
When I started writing about beer I was a neophyte in every sense of the word, I had no idea the community even existed and found myself rolling into a tide of information and people that overwhelmed me and had me deep into reading and searching for more. It was only 5 years ago but it feels like decades when I look back and read my rather hopeful and bright eyed posts about changing my relationship with beer. I hate that phrase almost as much as some hate the word "mouthfeel", but I digress. I really believed that by turning from lagers to the whole spectrum of styles available from not just here, but all over the world, that I was becoming a more discerning and thoughtful consumer of alcohol. This of course is the beginning stage of any new thing, it is the shiny dime catching your attention on the street and I still see it everywhere I look.
The echo chamber of social media, particularly Instagram but elsewhere too, gives you the feeling of a community connected with all the same goals and directions, socially, morally and otherwise. Of course, if you step back and look with any degree of realism, you know that good people do not all drink good beer and the reverse is true as well, assholes drink craft beer too or how would I even be here. Not to say we shouldn't try to make the world a better place, but shouting at the same people all the time doesn't really move the needle as much as we'd like to think it does. It's like buying into the hype that posting about a beer actually helps a brewery sell it to anyone but the same people we are all talking to anyway. The incredibly large world that exists outside of social media is where most of the beer buying happens and when you step away from the noise the internet generates you see things in a different light.
It is a funny circle to travel when I look back at my railings against big beer and corporate pints, my Evangelical phase in craft beer went on for a longer time than I thought but as with anything, eventually you see cracks in the facade and let fall away the blinders to revel that not everything is rosy with the world of hops and barley. After coming back to earth, I found myself drifting into lagers and pilsners again, to be sure a far more nuanced version of their macro cousins, but having beer that tastes like a damn beer is pretty refreshing in this hazy, pastry laced adjunct world. Of course as a guy who likes to write about beer everyday I acquire all kinds of styles to drink, my favourite being the heavily hopped West Coast IPAs which seem to my palate to be lager like in my ability to just consume them without a thought to anything but doing just that, drinking a beer.
This disjointed meander through my Sunday morning conversation with myself was going to be a look at where we go when we reach the end of craft beer rainbow but took a left and landed in a strange universe of truths and observations about the craft beer world around me. I remain a supporter, consumer, imbiber and general bon vivant when it comes to talking about it, but I also know that it is a small slice of that world I inhabit, most consumers care not for reviews or pictures. They care about the beer they're drinking, they care about supporting a local business, they care about having those pints with folks they love and cherish. We do what we do because we love to do it, I have no illusions about the larger world around it and I guess that's the point I can finally rest on today.
Be kind to each other, we could use more kindness.
Polk
