Month: July 2013

Really?

A bar manager at a gastropub begins a column in the Burlington Free Press with a story about sneaking in and out of a liquor store to buy a six-pack of Red Dog. I didn’t know that MillerCoors still made Red Dog, but then that’s not the point of “Remember when beer was fun?”

Instead Jeff Baker describes a place where I would have no interest in drinking.

There’s been a weird movement in the craft beer world that’s polarizing the beer scene: If you like craft beer then you must hate macro-beer. If you like macro-beer then you’re not one of us; you’re just a poser or at best an ignorant neophyte.

Is this really happening in Vermont? I don’t think Greg Noonan would approve. In fact, Baker doesn’t seem to be focusing on Vermont.

I see this blind us-against-them attitude expressed frequently online and mostly by the “fans” of craft beer. These Craft Beer Crusaders troll the forums of BeerAdvocate.com and Ratebeer.com, lambasting anything that isn’t craft, micro or nano.

The ramifications?

How did craft beer end up on this dead-end road to self-destruction? All this anger, all this negativity is going to destroy the movement and only serves to delegitimize the cause of brewing beer with flavor.

Again, really? This is not my beer world, although lord knows I am by almost any definition a beer geek. Saturday we paid $50 a ticket to attend the Midwest Belgian Beer Festival, one of the events that kicked off St. Louis Craft Beer Week. Granted, it costs about that much to park for two hours in New York City, but that price caused considerable discussion here in the Midwest. It turned out to be a deal.

More typical were the two evenings before. Friday we had dinner at 5 Star Burgers, which keeps about a half dozen beers from small St. Louis-area breweries on tap as well as selling wine and cocktails. The two young women (best guess later 20s or early 30s, although when you get to be as old as me guessing gets tougher) at the table next to us were both drinking beer.

Thursday we went to see Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers at the Gramophone. That’s part of the bottle beer list at the top of this post (draft list here). Waiting for Ruffins to go on Daria and I were both drinking 4 Hands Brewing’s Prussia when I noticed that the woman wearing a “Free Sean Payton” (did I mention Ruffins draws a NOLA friendly crowd?) was drinking Urban Chestnut Schnickelfritz from a bottle. The man she was with had a tall can of Busch, and the man they were talking to was holding a cocktail. Ruffins spent a good portion of the show with his trumpet in one had and a Bud Light bottle in the other.

Works for me. We can’t find beer we want to drink everywhere, but it’s dang close (you’d be surprised as the variety at Busch Stadium). So it seems fair to me that a Busch or a Red Dog drinker is entitled to the same.