We have the good fortune in the U.S. to have access – sometimes it takes a little work – to both sessionable beers and more intensely flavored ones (8 ounces might be enough).

What I think is that the solid and sessionable beers from the craft brewers are going to be the ones that supplant the detestable macrobrews. The super-duper-imperial stuff is only ever going to command a small part of the market – who wants to drink lots of that stuff?

Has he shut up about Barclay Perkins yet? Just wondering…

Seriously though…I think there’s a better word out there than “simple” in this case.

Well, last year’s Spaten Oktoberfest was pretty honest to my palate, I only hope it survived change to another year.

But in the States we started at a far different place. We had to return to making beer and drinking beer with more flavor. That’s been going on in Franconia forever.

Here’s the opinion part that is dangerous because it comes from thousands of miles away: The problem is not Franconian brewers. It is the big brewers who have reacted to declining beer sales by removing flavor from beer (Spaten lowering the IBU of its basic Hell from 25 to 20).

It sure doesn’t look like they have much respect for traditional beer. Or are they just giving consumers what they want?

Hey, it’s 7:30 in the morning here and my head already hurts. We seem to have wandered into a far wider topic. I’d rather think about the next “honest beer” I sit down in front of than how it is going to survive.

The marginal foothold of craft brewing be blamed even more on the corporate beer hegemony and its many advantages: the monopolization of shelf space, dominance in advertising, and the authority (remember “King of Beers”?) to miseducate consumers about what “beer” can even mean. I even have a little problem with some of these side products–particularly the “flavored” beers–that propagate the concept of the alternative-beer-other within the U.S. market.

Of course, there is a certain whininess to this stance–can’t craft beer step up and hold its own? Boston Beer Company has a series of television advertisements that are educational in nature and define beer in craft brewing terms. But the problem in the U.S., I think, is still largely conceptual. To U.S. consumers, those pricier six-packs still seem to represent alternatives–luxury alternatives–rather than things themselves.

If craft brewers began to adopt a new aesthetic of beer design, would this change the U.S. beer consumer climate? It wouldn’t hurt, but then the craft brewing market would be liable to remain “alternative” in people’s minds unless it could find ways to reassert itself culturally.

Recently it was contended by someone rather important in the beer world that German brewing is in the doldrums because they haven’t invented any “new” beer styles recently. The suggestion seemed to be that by adopting off the wall recipes and breaking with tradition, brewers would be able to reverse the downward market trend.

Yes, there’s been a marked decline in the German brewing industry. Copying the more extreme amongst US craft brewers is probably not the solution, though. There might be a market for the kind of beers that would produce, but it’s going to be very small.

The US experience does nothing to disprove that – the craft beer segment is still a small fraction of the whole, and seems to be mainly comprised of a few solid, fairly sessionable beers from the more experienced breweries such as Sierra Nevada and Boston. What does that tell us?

I don’t think it is fair to blame the beer in the glass.

Seems to me that Sam Smith’s Imperial Stout was coasting along as a nice, alternative beer choice — basking in a history only a few knew or understood — until the bombastic beer geeks decided it was the best style in the world (okay, I was in on the launch of the era too) and every beer needed to be bench-marked against it.