Beer in the new era

I hope that some of the Deths make it up this way (I'm living in SE WI now fwiw)

Does it usually? I think Revolution has a pretty wide distribution range.

I've only had the Cafe Deth, would love to try these others.

I love Cafe Deth and Deth by Cherries, but I'm so exhausted at the thought of chasing any of these down. If they happen to be on the shelves, cool, if not, whatever.

I've seen Revolution IPAs at like Woodman's and some other stores, but haven't seen any of their other offerings around. Then again I've only been here a few months.

They tend to linger a little, at least some of them. I love that they are in 12oz cans.

Oh my god Larry Bell sold Bells.

Holy shit. https://t.co/15uxzcb1Hj

— Guys Drinking Beer (@guysdrinkinbeer) November 10, 2021

oof

Wow, did not see that coming.

Backlash against Goose Island this year is palpable. Anecdotally, people seem to be sick of the high prices, and particularly the sense of hyped false scarcity that eventually gives way to the realization that with the exception of a few special variants their overpriced barrel aged beers often sit on the shelves for months and months. That's what happens when the big corporation that buys the company loses sight of what made the company worthwhile to begin with and focuses too much on flooding the market, strong-arming small companies (who themselves have begin to push back), and focusing on big chains like Jewel and Target and for that matter Binny's. Dunno if the story was posted, but some craft shops are just refusing to stock Goose Island at all.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/drink/ct-food-chicago-beer-stores-skipping-bourbon-county-stout-goose-island-20211122-7fr5t65qenhtzcoeho3434yhjm-story.html

I had the cola variant, it was weirdly okay. $24 a pop is too much though.

Not all the BCS sits on the shelves. I went to Woodman's, which is as big as any Jewels or Mariano's if not bigger, and the dude at the desk said their entire allotment sold in a day. Thankfully there was some Revo Straitjacket to soothe my barrel aged hankering.

It's still not that easy to get hold of here in the UK and generates some minor degree of fuss when it does make it over via Goose Island's UK presence or Beer Hawk (AB InBev owned UK online beer shop). I admit I'm aiming to buy some when the 2021 appears in the next week or two.

Don't get me wrong, it's still popular. But I also see it sitting on the shelves for months and months. Same with KBS and a couple of other once-coveted barrel-aged offerings. Just a few weeks ago I was able to get another 4-pack of Revolutions's Deth by Cherries, which was one of my favorite variants (is that word tainted now?) from 2020. Not by hunting for it or anything, just finding it where it usually would be at the usual Binny's. It's been sitting in the same place on the same shelf since last year.

Now, top-tier bourbon, pretty much anything with an age statement or pedigree, that stuff has not been able to keep up with demand.

For bottling spirits, there has also been a glass shortage.

Josh Noel, in another Chicago Trib article, ranked this year's BCS-es and ranked the basic bottling #1. Which is nice, since that's the easiest one to find.

I only had Revolution's main Cafe Deth but loved that. Also happened to have two others recently, Pipeworks' Rudolph vs. Unicorn ("peppermint bark" imperial stout) and Off Color's Holiday Fatigure (brewed with orange, pink peppercorns, and cloves). Loved them both, though I'm just a casual beer person.

Want to pick up some Death By Coconut from Oskar Blues while it's in season. Was a total epiphany first time I had it.

I like that beer a lot. Want to say it got a label redesign relatively recently, so I think I've walked by it a bunch without realizing it was there.

Picked up a four-pack of something today and saw a 4-pack of Half Acre's Benthic (bourbon barrel aged with coffee and coconut) marked at $48 on the shelf. And that's not the store gouging, either. I dunno, given even the priciest Revolution variant is more than $10 cheaper for a 4-pack I just can't pull the trigger on close to $50 for this. $12 is a lot for 12oz.

Fucked up (in an OK way) ordering a Maine “Lunch” not realizing it was $11 for a 14 oz. pour, and it felt like a bookend to Pliny The Younger. Loved it.

I'm drinking this stuff called Pecan Pie Mind Over Matter from Magnify, which is out of character for me as I don't typically buy these desserty beers. It's ok. It reminds me a little of rum and coke somehow, but not as nasty. Definitely sugary tasting, not sure why I would have expected otherwise.

can i ask how you came to possess this beverage that you weren't predisposed to like and as a result are not really liking?

I went to a local place I like and just said "what do you have right now that's interesting" and got a few different single cans. The last one I drank from the batch was a Grimm dunkel, which I really enjoyed.

Just heard about this. Various Oskar Blues beers and Cigar City Jai Alai are regulars with me.

https://www.foodandwine.com/news/monster-beverages-buys-canarchy-craft-beer-breweries

"When did getting grabbing a beer become so complicated?"

With the caveat that I know next to nothing about brewing beer, there is little that amazes me more than when a brewery is able to create a delicious high ABV beer that totally disguises the alcohol level. Like, barrel aged stouts and the like play up the ABV, pushing the barrel, the whiskey hints, that sort of thing. But I'm drinking an absolutely delicious Hop Butcher triple IPA (tasting notes are "juicy peaches, fresh citrus and ripe tropical") and it is so smooth my wife guessed it was 4.5% when it's actually 10.5% (!).

In perhaps the clearest expression of BCBS "whale" decline I have personally experienced, today I bought a bottle of Double Barrel 2021 for something like $20 under MSRP and there were several more bottles on the shelf.

Weed drink in the new era

A highly refreshing beverage is coming very soon... 😎

Chill State is sparkling water infused with 5mg hemp-derived THC and 25mg broad-spectrum CBD, flavored with terpenes to make it taste, well, how it's supposed to taste. 🌿 pic.twitter.com/Cj3l9684uk

— Fair State Co-op (@FairStateCoop) September 14, 2022

We took a brewery tour here some months back, and somebody asked if cannabis can be used the same way hops can, and he said sort of, but chemically apparently the THC breaks down and doesn't have much of an effect. basically said if you want to smoke weed, smoke weed. want to drink beer, drink beer.

Different thing, but I do really like Spiteful’s Alley Time, named because it smells dank.

xp idk for sure but my guess is that if FS is making this stuff, 1 can is gonna get you 5mg worth of high

Didn't even notice that that was THC water, not beer. In the beer thread!

Anyway, inevitable long thread about brewing with cannabis here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/hocfqq/brewing_beer_with_thc/

the tl;dr seems to be that to get the effects of THC you need to add it (as a tincture or something) at to the beer at the end, *after* the brewing is done. Which is less brewing with cannabis and more just adding THC to beer like you would add cream to coffee.

Started rewatching Top Gun: Maverick, and I'm willing to bet that this combination of draft beers has never existed at any bar in the history of the universe.

Further supports the theory that Mav died when ejecting at Mach 10 & that the rest of the movie is just a death dream. pic.twitter.com/ZHhwhk1vep

— Secrets and Laws (@secretsandlaws) October 14, 2022

? 4 of those are at just about every bar near me, and one of them only isn't because they don't distribute out here.

Yeah, no idea. They go into details down thread.

they’re not wrong, but they should also like, go find something to do

Nat light on draft is unusual but the others I see all the time.

Product placement vs. painstaking veracity. If only Paul Greengrass had directed Maverick...

Mining crypto would be a better use of a computer than whatever this is.

lol

Buncha grouches, clearly that was an unserious goof from a former CIA agent turned national security expert.

i am liking milkshake ipas these days.

neon fantasy by icarus brewing is really good.

any "oat cream ipa" produced by other half rules. i had two kegs of that stuff at my wedding.

i wish i didn't love these calorie bombs.

a brewery near my parents' house, old hights brewing, had a good milkshake ipa brewed with strawberries. also one near me -- alementary -- had a good vegan one called "lizard brain." not as sweet as others in the style but still with that rich mouthfeel.

I'm drinking Hamm's

Man, there is just so much good beer and so many good breweries.

My godly local beer shop has closed after 20 years. The owner died, sadly. This was a guy with an immense taste in beer, but who also had Faust and Coltrane box sets behind the counter (he had to keep them in the shop 'to save my marriage' was his explanation).

Anyway, I went to a different place I'd not been to for ages, and the dude there was saying he felt things had reached critical mass; that he wasn't sure how the market was going to cope with a) the fall off in spending coupled with b) the fact that the prices had got so unmanageably high - supply side and in the shops and bars. There's also the traditional market - brewers with 4 or 5 solid beers, who were, for a time at least, supposed to be victims of the craft beer craze: these haven't gone away, have maintained a basic price strategy and are as solid as ever. He felt that so many brewers had fallen into the trap of novelty and simply didn't have a 'core range' to fall back on.

It's a conversation that'll be happening across a bunch of industries I'm sure but it'll be interesting to see where it all goes.

Yeah, there are all sorts of crises that beer shops and breweries are navigating, from the cost of cans to ingredients to more general stuff like rent and energy costs. As I understand it beer drinking has been trending downward for years as a broader market, but I've also heard tales of breweries benefitting from covid and quarantine and seeing increased sales. The newer breweries that have caught my eye do seem to be focusing on a relatively simple set of core beers, typically lagers, but even they can't resist a little novelty now and then. And of course, if you are known for novelty then novelty becomes your stable; one man's novelty is another man's core, be it hazy or sour or wild or whatever.

There was a casual poll taken at one of the beer forums (beer advocate?) that established the highest price of a pint at their local spot was currently more than $8. That's inflation at work, I guess. I can't tell if the price of canned beer is going up, but I do see more 4-packs going for $18, though there are far fewer more than that than there are less than that.

My post was actually sparked by a couple of closures I read about, but not necessarily the way one might think. I had never even *heard* of these breweries before, let alone tried them. They'd just sort of opened, succeeded for a few year, failed and closed all without me knowing, which sort of speaks to the saturation of the market. There are extremely well regarded breweries with very limited distribution in (for example) the Chicago suburbs that I presume are doing OK in their little exurb islands, with cheaper rents and regular patrons with more limited local options. The same reason I don't go out there (too far) might be the same reason they have a more dedicated clientele (it's close), and if they catch the attention of beer nerds willing to make a 45 minute drive, or lure them there with limited distro in the city, that's just bonus stuff. In the rare instance I get something from one of these places I think, man, that's a good beer! Too bad it's not being sold down the street.

This guava gose tastes just like the block of guava paste I used to buy from the corner store in 1984

Just opened up a 2013 Goose Island Proprietor's Stout (their bourbon barrel stout with coconut) that I've had hidden away in the basement, and amazingly, a decade later, it's tasting pretty good! I mean, maybe I'll get really sick or something, but it tastes fine to me. Still got some coconut going on, too.

you'll be ok josh, glad it's tasting good

That was the year Treasure Island in Hyde Park kept stocking that beer as fast as I could buy it. I sent bottles to a few thread regulars then. I miss bottle trading a bit, but it is also cool having expanded access to great products now in a way that didn't exist then.

Josh (or other Chicago folks), have you had anything from Light The Lamp up in Grayslake? Had an IPA (a cold IPA, I think) from them that I loved, been planning to visit their taproom.

I have so much probably gone bad beer in my closet that I’ll never drink. Should have drank it 10 years ago.