Goose Island is pretty good beer. Nothing wrong with cheaper prices. It isn't going to get me to stop drinking Union Craft or German, Austrian, and Belgian brews but if all they have is generic beers at a bar I would rather get Goose Island for 3 bucks than a Coors Light. There is certainly no shortage of craft brews. I don't see how this is going to effect craft brewers but a certain point the market will be saturated with the craft breweries and the fad will end.
No... the good ones will survive, the mediocre ones like Goose Island that are purchased by large corporate breweries will survive, and the crappy ones will disappear. The fad won't end though.
this is all true. i imagine the low prices won't be sustainable, but that's where the atlantic article gets interesting... domestic beers case sale decline doesn't necessarily correlate 1:1 with dollar sales decline. so domestic beer is becoming more profitable, and these same companies can probably subsidize some craft brew brands they own for the time being so they maintain most of the taps in bars.
Sure it will. You can tell as IPA's are so much more popular than everything else combined. It isn't like people are actually changing and liking new things. They have gone from one extreme to the other. I doubt it will be the best beer that will survive. More the best marketing and management that will survive. Unless people start exclusively drinking local beers than it will collapse.
not to turn this into another "you have shit taste" discussions, but i really have to just write off your opinion on IPAs and assume that you've just never had a good one. and that makes sense... there's, oh, i don't know, a handful of good IPAs available year-round in the DC/Baltimore area, and unless you have it fresh, on draft, and from a clean tap, it's not going to leave much of an impression on you. IPA will forever be my go-to, because when they are good, they're fucking great.
Got that Stochastic Grapefruit thing waiting in the fridge...
why aren't you drinking this now?
This doesn't even have anything to do with my opinion on the quality of IPA's. It is just easy to see it is fad. People have gone from an extreme of barely any hop flavor to being hit over the head with hops. I like some IPAs. But I wouldn't' want to just drink Dunkels the rest of my life either or Beligian Blondes. Or even Heifweizens. If people really were getting into tastes of beer they would be trying everything instead of just drinking one style of beer.
but IPAs have everything to do with why you think craft beer is a fad.
IPAs are somewhat of a gateway to craft beer... for a lot of people, i imagine it introduces flavors they didn't know existed.
so not only is it not a fad, once more people realize how great a fresh IPA can taste, they'll be seeking out more local, fresh beers. i don't think we'll consider the market saturated for a long, long time.
