Today, a variation on focus on a particular beer (or beers) Friday.
I’m going to tell you some of the beers I sampled (a few ounces of each, not nearly enough to pass judgment) last night. You see if you can guess the brewery where they were made.
– A saison.
– An apricot saison.
– A hard cider.
– A spruce-flavored ESB.
– An orange chocolate stout.
What do you in general of what seems a clear trend to flavoured beers? I noticed all kinds of flavoured beer in New York recently, not just porter and stout, where the whole thing started many years ago, but ESB, pale ale, even lager. I suppose there is no bright line, if some beers can be flavoured any can, but I believe in most cases the taste isn’t improved by adding fruit or ginger, say, to beer. I can abide it in porter or stout if the taste is not overdone, but in the case of ESB, say, the style is so perfectly rendered when well done that one wonders why any extraneous tastes are needed.
Gary
Sorry, Stan, I meant, what do you think in general of this seeming trend?
Gary
Gary, as you wrote, there is no bright line – and I think that includes if you’d call this a trend, or at least a growth area. The number of options may grow without that niche (total sales) getting much larger. My guess is flavored beers will amount to x percent of the market, that being a small percentage, with with bunch of rotating (or one off) beers available, perhaps depending on the season.
I would call the beer I had yesterday simply a spruce beer (very sprucy), rather than comparing it to an ESB.
No other hints? The only apricot beer I know of off-hand is Magic Hat’s #9, but I don’t believe that is a saison and I don’t think they brew those other beers (though it wouldn’t be a stretch from their style).
Saranac?
Saranac is my guess as well.
And the answer is . . . the Anheusher-Busch St. Louis brewery.
A-B hosted the monthly MBAA district meeting, and this month the “technical presentation” was a tour of the pilot brewery.
They served a variety of beers developed at the pilot brewery, including Shock Top and the Bud Light “rita” line. Also, several test batches, most (all?) of which won’t be served outside the pilot brewery (or maybe the occasional festival). Spotted one called “Project Captain Crunch” touring the brewery, but that wasn’t one of the beers we had a chance to try. Too bad.