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14-03-2018, 17:20
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The other day we encountered a hazy pale-n-hoppy beer from a local brewery that was decent in its own right, and certainly well on trend, but something about it bothered us: it simply seemed indistinguishable to quite a lot of other beers from quite a lot of other breweries.Maybe this has been on our minds because our attempt to pin down the definition(s)* of ‘craft beer’ (https://boakandbailey.com/guides-lists/when-we-say-craft-beer-we-mean/) resurfaced again lately. The first definition we provide there, with reference to Michael Jackson and Roger Protz, includes the word ‘distinctive’ as a key characteristic — a sense that an experienced palate could not easily mistake that beer for any other.
Now, there aren’t many beers that really fit that criterion, and we’d probably struggle to tell, say, Bass from St Austell Cornish Bitter tasted blind on most occasions, but, still, perhaps it has got harder still in recent years. When there were a few hundred breweries in the UK, each making a handful of beers, there were plenty of unique selling points to go around: this one does lager, that one uses Cascade, there’s one down the road making an imperial stout that smells of puke (https://twitter.com/MelissaCole/status/410720060856999937)*to a sort-of-historic recipe, and so on. Now, with going on for a couple of thousand, it’s obviously harder to come up with anything completely new that is also likely to sell in any volume in pubs, i.e. that is not completely bonkers (https://boakandbailey.com/2016/02/magical-mystery-pour-2-tzatziki-sour/).
Even so, we do wonder if the tendency to rely on the same handful of commercial yeast strains, the same broad families of hops, and to look to the same few highly-rated beers for inspiration, isn’t leading into a cul-de-sac.
What is*your*thing? What makes*your beer different, and better, than Bloggs’s? If you can’t answer that then you probably won’t convince a pub or shop to take your beer over one that’s 85 per cent identical but twopence cheaper, or with nicer packaging. You probably won’t convince drinkers to develop any particular loyalty to your brand either.
If you’re not distinctive, aren’t you… generic?
QUICK POST: Same Old Song (https://boakandbailey.com/2018/03/same-old-song/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (https://boakandbailey.com)


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