It is interesting, the market wants 2 types of colas and an infinite number of beer varieties at the moment.
Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
251–260 of 309 posts
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#252It is interesting, the market wants 2 types of colas and an infinite number of beer varieties at the moment.
Sodas are staples, beers are a treat. Consistency vs novelty.
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#253I live in New England. There isn’t a single brewery in any New England state that would cause an uproar if it ceased to sell beer tomorrow. Sure I have some preferred beers but they are all interchangeable in the big picture. Such is progress - there is no more regional taste, only trend. Even the bottle conditioned beer you stand in line for on vacation - a bottle of Duvel will be reliably better and probably cheape…
Any of Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, or Lawsons would be an uproar, and they’re all within like 60 miles of each other. Across New England there are many.
I've had all of them, other than being darlings of craft beer geeks, there is nothing really different about them. Parent is correct.
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#254Anchor had its warehouse unionize a few years ago. I’m guessing this change is a reaction to that.
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#255It is interesting, the market wants 2 types of colas and an infinite number of beer varieties at the moment.
It was so hard for Pepsi to get into fast food restaurants that they had to buy several chains [0].
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate local beers. Local wine makes sense, there is terroir, a sense of place etc. Local beers are just some weird competition to see who can make the hopiest bitterest beer. I don't want to try a new lager every time I cross county lines, when I want beer I want something reliable.
People get it in their heads that small and local means good or at least better than the stuff mass-produced by MegaCorp, but that's not always the case. I think beer is a case where it's hard to beat Big Beer. Heineken, the second-biggest brewery in the world, moved 231.2 million hectoliters of beer in 2021[0], or nearly 19,000 acre-feet of beer (!). How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heinek…
> How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?
In my opinion: most of them. Heineken is not a good beer. It tastes similar to other mass-produced stuff: inoffensive bordering on flavorless. I'm actually stunned at the comment. It's like if I asked how many local restaurants make hamburgers better than Wendy's (Budweiser is McDonald's in this analogy).
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#257It is interesting, the market wants 2 types of colas and an infinite number of beer varieties at the moment.
I wish this wasn't the case. I am not a big soda drinker, but I had a place near me that carried a variety of different colas and they were very unique an many were delicious.
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#258It is interesting, the market wants 2 types of colas and an infinite number of beer varieties at the moment.
Sodas are staples, beers are a treat. Consistency vs novelty.
I wonder if it is more of an issue with how dominant the two brands are? There are a lot of exclusivity deals with restaurants.
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raging Bitch is made by Flying Dog brewery whose art is done by Ralph Steadman - well known for his collaborations with Hunter S Thompson. I started drinking it because of that fact after reading Fear and Loathing for the first time in college. It’s also nice and strong - 9% iirc
> It’s also nice and strong - 9% iirc As all good stouts should be, in my humble opinion! My all time favourite beer is the BrewDog, Nogne and Mikkeller collaboration stout: the Black Tokyo Horizon. It's 17.2%!
Dry Irish stouts, like Guinness, are good and despite their reputation, are not (and should not be) anywhere near that strong. They come in at ~4.2% abv, like most "light" beers.
Re: Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brewing high ABV beers is actually quite the challenge, especially once it gets above about 10%. The grain to strike water ratio changes so much that lautering often gets “stuck” due to the thick consistency of the grain bed.
It’s pretty easy to get into the ~15% range with the right yeast (champagne yeast is the best starting point) and attention to sugar conversion (I wish I could remember the details here but I haven’t brewed for about a decade) and importantly for beer, good ventilation. I had a barleywine that should have been in this range ferment for about 12 hours and it clogged the airlock, exploded the carboy, and generally ruin…
I miss GreenFlash's Barleywine - they put up a retired baseball card-style poster with stats for it.