Some people will actually tell you they hate New Belgium Fat Tire Amber Ale. It’s complicated, and I really just want to pass along a few numbers, so I’ll simply says it seems silly to me, but it’s their energy.
Fact is that as New Belgium drives deeper into the East Coast this year it will be Fat Tire drinkers ask for first. (Witness this photo taken in South Carolina before New Belgium entered the state. The owners posted the sign in self defense.)
Some interesting figures emerged last week in the run up to the brewery’s twentieth anniversary on Tuesday. Although overall production increased 13% last year, to 661,000 31-gallon barrels, Fat Tire sales grew only 2%.
According to Impact Databank, Fat Tire accounted for 70% of New Belgium sales in 2008, 67% in 2009 and 60% in 2010. The biggest change last year was the introduction of Ranger IPA. New Belgium sold more than 50,000 barrels in 2010, 8% of production, more Ranger IPA than its well known neighbor, Odell Brewing, made in total.
Never having had a chance to have a Fat Tire, I sure would like to get the chance to get bored by it. I found my first six of Full Sail Pale Ale the other day in a NNY grocery – another beer that appears to receive poor reviews for being what it intends to be – and happily enjoyed the unbombastic experience on a Saturday evening.
Fat Tire was the cheap shitty beer we bought in New Mexico after work. To me it was about the same a Yuengling, an ok cheap beer that was a step up from PBR or Miller Lite. Nothing to get excited about, 1554 is a much better beer from New Belgium.
As a foot note I’ll say that I initially liked both Yuengling and Fat Tire, Yuengling got me through college. But after a few years of drinking either I just found I couldn’t stand them.
I remember being shocked by how good Fat Tire was the first time I tasted it in Portland, OR well over 12 years ago. It’s been dumbed down over the years and while still a perfectly good beer I agree it’s certainly not worth anywhere near the hype it receives (kind of like the east-of-the-Mississippi Coors phenomenon of the ’70s). I haven’t been much of a fan of their subsequent offerings, but I was pleasantly surprised by Ranger IPA.
It would seem everywhere you go you run into a version of the “overhyped beer” syndrome. Being so close to Bell’s actual brewery where I live in Michigan you will find so many people who will say the same thing about Oberron. Of course, we also have our share of Two hearted haters as well. I like to link it all to the “familiarity breeds contempt” frame of thinking.
At the risk of throwing out even more cliches, I have a feeling that the “the hops are always more bitter” on your side of the fence. I want what you have and you want what I have.
As a side note (or a slight divergence to the discussion), Robert, I totally understand your point about over exposure. I used to cook at a place that did tons of weddings over the summer. I grew to the point where the sight of a piece of salmon or filet mignon are disruptive to my well being.
I regret taking the bait, but take it I shall. Among my circle of friends, New Belgium’s flagship is known as “Flat Tire.” You’re right that there’s very little to rouse the dander when you consider just what’s in the glass, but New Belgium won’t allow that.
A decade or so ago, NB decided to make a run at Portland, Oregon, and spent God knows how much money securing tap handles and grocery store end-cap displays. They got distributors to paint trucks, and they managed to place neon signs in every other pub. Drive through town in about 2003, and you would assume Fat Tire was the city beer.
There were other offenses. New Belgium STILL calls Fat Tire a Belgian beer. This kind of willful muddying of the stylistic waters is a problem for an entry level beer. New Belgium aggressively sells itself as the soul of craft brewing, which is fine, but combined with a Normandy invasion and a mild, mis-categorized product, left many in Portland feeling less than charitable.
I have no idea how much Fat Tire NB ultimately sold here, but the invasion was repelled. Worse, it left a lot of people feeling less charitable toward the company’s other products, so many of which ARE complex and Belgian. Sometimes backlashes against beers are silly and unwarranted, but I resist the charge that all are. Sometimes a brewery screws up and foments resentment. Sometimes, in fact, a brewery must be willing to look at business strategies and see where they’re culpable in creating the backlash.
Once again, the “In-Your-Face” beer geek crowd squeaks louder than those who like to enjoy a beer without thinking (or thumping their chest) too hard.
Is it Pliny The Elder? No. Is it Macro-Swill? Hardly. It’s a nice, flavorful beer that fills a spot between a lighter lager or ale and the heavy-hitter IBU/ABV stuff that makes the modern beer geek squeal.
I have no reason to actually *hate* Fat Tire, except that right now in central Maryland it’s the “can’t get it here” craft beer that, by a five-to-one margin, is the most requested “can’t-get-it-here-yet” beer at beer bars that cater to the folks who check off new beers weekly at the “I’ve-drunk-more-than-you-have” beer sites.
I had it when it was illegally bootlegged east in Bombers in the early 1990s, along with their Belgian Abbey and Old Cherry Ale. It was at least reasonably good then. The brewery has moved and expanded twice since then, in both cases massively expanding production to the point where they’re effectively the Yuengling of the West. The Fat Tire I’ve bought in Arizona of late. draft and bottle, seems stripped of a dimension of the flavor I remember in the bottle-conditioned bombers, but I have to ask how much of that is just 18 years of memory and palate fatigue and expanded experience with more and better beers, and how much of that is a “dumbed-down” beer. On top of that, all the other New Belgium beers I’ve sampled are SO much better–Mothership Wit, Biere de Mars, 1554, etc.
It’s not quite like someone going to a Belgian Beer Festival (like the one at Max’s in Baltimore in February, with 150+ Belgian drafts over three days or more) and falling over themselves to order Stella Artois or Palm. But it’s damned close.
In response to Mr. Jefferson, it’s a well-known fact that you can stock 500 beers in your bar or liquor store, and daily people will walk in and request #621. You can stock 1,050 beers, and they’ll ask for #1,084. You can expand to 1,500 beers, and folks will ask for #1,538 and #1,647. You can expand to 1,900, and they’ll be asking for #1,925 and #1,996. At that point, you’re justified in having them bounced out your front door.
Fat Tire has without a doubt been dumbed down–Garret Oliver even mentions it in The Brewmaster’s Table. The Belgian phenols and spiciness back then made it more akin to a Belgian pale ale or even an abbey dubbel. Now it’s a fairly straightforward amber–not much different or better than you can get at any local brewpub.
I have no qualms with NB but I can’t stand Fat Tire. It’s nothing to do with marketing or image or any of that nonsense. I just can’t finish a pint. There’s something in it that just really makes it hard to drink for me. I don’t know if it’s the carared malts it supposedly has (I don’t know any other beer that uses it off the top of my head) but I just can’t drink it. I’ll pretty much order anything else if there’s an option, even a Bud.