Hazy IPA too often serves as the whipping post for any cold takes by grumpy old craft beer cowboys. Now I’ve long been a critic of hazy IPAs, largely because of the sameness of many iterations of the style, which comically present themselves as different beers. (Cue the joke, “This one was hopped with Citra, Mosaic, and Galaxy. And we hopped this one with Galaxy, Citra, and Mosaic. And this one has Mosaic, Galaxy, and Citra.”) 

I also find many versions of the style not to my personal taste and that’s totally fine. I personally would love to see bitterness and balance make a return to craft beer supremacy but there are still plenty of non-hazy IPAs available in nearly every tap room from coast to coast, so no need to complain. I still drink hazy IPAs on occasion, but we would all do well to keep in mind the maxim of “drink what you like.” 

The Hazy IPA Conspiracy Begins

The criticisms cited in the Just Drinks piece, while hardly new in craft beer discussion circles, are representative of long held grievances against a style that has seemingly buoyed the industry during what otherwise would have been even tougher times. Holding hazy IPAs up as the culprits behind craft beer’s stagnation in recent years is more based on vibes than reality. 

Even criticizing the uniformity of the hazy IPA experience seems a little rich as it’s not like the amber, brown, and pale ales that once dominated craft beer were all that different from one another. Just as with modern hazy IPAs, some were produced poorly, some expertly, but flavor and aroma wise, they were also all pretty similar. That’s the whole point of beer styles.

That some or even many brewers don’t themselves love hazy IPAs hardly matters. Unlike the 1990s and early 2000s when craft beer was personality driven (RIP the “rock star brewer” era), consumers today don’t connect with breweries on an individual or personality level. They don’t know, let alone care that the brewer doesn’t like the style. 

As a rare voice of sensibility relating to hazy IPAs, Lee Lord, brewmaster at Narragansett in Rhode Island, counseled in Just Drinks that brewers need to “keep an eye on emerging and young consumers and see how we can help each other get a new generation excited and passionate about craft beer”. 

Another common conspiracy theory is that the emergence of hazy IPAs caused thousands of new breweries to open that otherwise shouldn’t have. As an industry, craft brewing is no stranger to trend-chasing outsiders jumping into the beer business with dollar signs in their eyes. Hazy IPA didn’t cause the huge rise in the number of craft breweries in the past fifteen years, though its vibrant sales helped sustain many new breweries.  

Nano Breweries Changed Everything

Individuals looking to see when things changed for craft beer should go back a few years before the emergence of the hazy IPA style and reconnect with the most significant and influential change that craft beer has experienced in the past fifteen years: the rise of the nano. Largely forgotten in craft beer lore, nanobreweries changed the DNA of craft beer. They radically altered the business model, which went from battling it out for space on liquor and grocery store shelves and bar and restaurant tap handles to an own-premise model where small breweries pivoted to selling beer through their own taprooms, keeping more of the profits in-house. 

The modern nano-brewery trend (putting aside pioneers such as New Albion, Dogfish Head, and other OG small start-ups) started around 2010 with the emergence of dozens and then thousands of small brewery players who only intended to sell beer in their own taprooms. 

The first I can recall visiting was Hess Brewing in San Diego, which debuted its tiny brewing operation in 2010, starting in an 800 square foot industrial space. Founder Mike Hess started a blog, appropriately called the Mike Hess Brewing Odyssey, that chronicled in real time the process of opening his tiny brewery. The blog, which recounted everything from the banalities of navigating municipal bureaucratic regimes to sourcing raw ingredients for brewing, became required reading for hundreds of individuals looking to open their own small breweries around the country. 

On entering the tiny space, complete with a small bar fronting a few tap handles, Hess felt to me more like a curiosity than a harbinger of things to come. But nanos helped create the future of craft beer in which we live. It’s not that today’s landscape is filled with thousands of nanos. The founders of these tiny operations quickly learned that while opening such small spaces kept the capital expenditures down, the math just didn’t work to make them successful businesses. Brewing a 1 or 3 barrel batch takes roughly the same amount of time that a 20 or 100 barrel batch does. But consumers run through that beer at insanely quick rates, requiring a lot of effort to replenish quickly depleted stocks. 

So the nanobrewers, including Hess, quickly learned they needed to vastly scale up their operations if they were going to stay in business. By 2013, Hess had opened a 30 barrel brewery and tap room and has gone on to open several more locations. But it all started with a dream, a little money, and a few barrels of beer at a time served right to his customers in his own shop. 

At the time Hess opened in 2010, there were only 1700 breweries in the United States and it felt like a lot. For most of craft beer’s existence, roughly the same number of breweries opened as closed in a given year. In 2010, 63 opened, and 51 closed. That would be the last year these numbers were roughly on par until 2023. By 2011, 91 opened, and 28 closed. By 2018, 461 breweries opened, and 99 closed. Brewery openings would spike, while closures remained low, until COVID hit. In 2023, 165 breweries opened, while 145 closed. 

Nano breweries and their own-premise model paved the way for the modern craft beer business. 

While the nano model may not have survived, the idea of selling beer in your own tap room took hold, and this was the single biggest change in craft beer in decades. Instead of distributing beer widely across a region or even the country, and trying to sell a handful of common and popularly agreeable styles, brewers could experiment more. They could also act responsively to consumers, who gave them invaluable and immediate face-to-face feedback in contrast to faceless consumers in far flung states. 

Who’s In Charge Here?

At the heart of this debate appears to be a seemingly straightforward yet hard to answer question: should craft beer be brewer directed or consumer directed? 

Brewers long loved to boast that they “brew the beer we want to drink.” But that slogan only made sense in a time when flavorful beer was trying to differentiate itself from macro produced beers. Once craft beer infiltrated the mainstream and became ubiquitous in bars, restaurants, and package stores in the farthest reaches of the country, the idea behind that shibboleth ceased to exist. After routinely receiving direct feedback from customers, that brewers chose to be responsive to popular views, especially in the case of hazy IPAs, is hardly something to criticize. It’s simply good business. Others decry that “marketing” has negatively impacted craft beer. This argument also feels like a strawman for the old “brewer-driven” approach to craft beer that many claim has disappeared.

In one laugh out loud moment in the Just Drinks piece, an “anonymous veteran brewer” blamed craft brewers for their predicament. 

“A large segment of beer drinkers only wants to drink ‘hop juice’ because that’s what they’ve been told they want and breweries became obsessed with making the ‘latest and greatest’ beer that they could charge a lot for. All that stymied innovation and creativity.”

Again, brewers seem pissed that consumers don’t share their palates and style preferences. The level of griping from brewers over the alleged death of the “brewer-driven” model would be laughable if it didn’t have such serious real world consequences for an industry that can’t seem to plot a direction for its future. 

The popularity of consumer products, including beer, wine, and spirits, ebbs and flows over time. In just the past decade, we’ve seen the rise and fall of cocktails, cider, hard seltzers, and many others. Each will continue to play some role in the drinking landscape but no drink has a right to the public’s attention. Craft beer has many issues but chief among them is a generational disconnect. The audience for craft beer continues to age, younger folks make fun of craft beer dads and their beer samplers on TikTok, and the industry stands in a corner publicly wishcasting for the return of “beer-flavored beer.” 

To criticize an active and engaged audience of hazy IPA drinkers just because you don’t personally prefer the style or think they should be drinking helles is self-defeating. Hazy IPA has helped connect younger drinkers to craft beer. Unless you want a taproom occupied by a handful of 55 year old dudes grumbling about the good old days on RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, I’m not sure that shitting on hazy IPAs makes any sense.

Our journalism needs your support. Please visit our Patreon Page to show your appreciation for independent beer writing. 

The post Hazy IPA Conspiracy Theories first appeared on All About Beer.

I support the idea of non-alcoholic (NA) beer. I’ve long encouraged drinkers to routinely reevaluate their relationships with alcohol and I think Dry January is a noble and worthy exercise. It has been exciting to watch as brewers and distillers embraced alcohol-free versions of their standard offerings, whether they be NA beers or Phony Negronis. I love alternating between full flavored lagers and IPAs and low to no ABV cocktails and NA beers while on a pub crawl or out with friends. And many people from across generational divides increasingly agree. They recognize that consuming alcohol is rarely good for you and needs to be done in moderation. Occasional moments of self-reflection about our alcohol intake are a critical form of self-care, especially for those in and around the beer industry.

American craft brewers are used to setting trends, not chasing them. Local brewing scenes from Denmark to Thailand to Brazil have taken cues from American craft brewers. So when craft beer sales here stalled in recent years, Americans brewers flailed about in search of any new path forward, whether guided by ciders, hard seltzers, or ready-to-drink canned cocktails. Not wanting to miss out on a growth opportunity, many American craft brewers jumped at the latest trend, releasing their own NA options. 

While I had high hopes for NA beer, the results have been largely disappointing. 

The unavoidable truth is that most American non-alcoholic beer is pretty terrible and not worth drinking. Or worse, it can actually be dangerous. Producing NA beer is a pretty complicated, expensive, and oddly secretive process and few craft breweries have sufficient resources and dedication to do it properly. The result is that nearly every version tastes like one of two things: unfermented wort or some weird off flavor ridden version of the underlying style. 

With this country’s sad history with NA beer, you can’t blame craft brewers for making such underwhelming non-alcoholic beer. The American NA market was long dominated by the country’s biggest brewers, and they had little incentive to make flavorful NA beers. Often thin, watery, and tasting like the worst beer you’ve ever had, generations of drinkers assumed that NA beer could never taste good. Consumers of non-alcoholic beer were considered a throwaway market, derided as lesser-thans–pregnant women, people in recovery, the infirm–who should be thankful that they could even find a dusty old bottle of O’Douls or Sharp’s. If the country’s largest breweries couldn’t be bothered to produce a decent NA beer, could we really expect smaller, less well financed brewers to do better? 

It’s not that NA beer can never be good, quite to the contrary. Where big American brewers failed, their European counterparts recognized the market potential for NA beer and focused their efforts on producing tasty products. With an established love of fuller flavored beer, Europeans institutionally understood the importance of balance, of consuming lower alcohol beers, and even just drinking NA beer while out with friends. And being the prideful bunch they are, European brewers didn’t treat this significant market with disrespect. Instead, they engineered full flavored NA beers capable of fooling most beer drinkers into thinking they were drinking the real thing. 

Craft beer’s success may be partly to blame here. As the most popular craft beer style is IPA, many brewers jumping into the non-alcoholic market tried brewing an alcohol-free version of their flagship hoppy beer. Things didn’t go well. As any dedicated IPA drinker can tell you, the fragile aromatics of hoppy beers fade quickly. In a NA beer, once the tropical fruit aromas fade, little defense is left against the familiar off-flavors often lurking within.

Beyond the off-flavors and generally unsatisfying experience of drinking American NA beers, there’s also the safety angle to consider. Unlike beer with alcohol in it, which inhibits the growth of nasty microorganisms like E. coli, listeria, and botulism, beer without alcohol is open to infection unless tunnel pasteurized, an expensive process often beyond the resources of smaller brewers, is employed. While some smaller brewers dispute the type of pasteurization required to keep their NA beers safe, their reluctance at discussing their internal processes (and whether their beer is pasteurized at all) is hardly confidence inspiring.

NA beer leaders such as Bill Shufelt of Athletic Brewing, Keith Villa of Ceria Brewing, and Garrett Oliver at Brooklyn Brewing make this point often in discussions with brewers. During a recent Craft Brewers Conference panel hosted by All About Beer’s editor John Holl, Villa made this point in stark terms, saying “The last thing we need in this category is for a craft brewer to make a product that accidentally got infected with a pathogen and makes somebody sick or kills them…We don’t want to hurt anybody. These are our customers, we want repeat customers, we don’t want to kill them.”

On that cheery note, the secret to finding a good NA beer is often the opposite of advice for finding a good craft beer: look for the biggest brewery’s beer you can find. With the resources and time necessary to produce safe and palatable beers, the largest breweries–especially European ones–produce the best NA beers . For my money, Guinness 0.0 and Heineken 0.0 are two of the best options. Widely available in distribution, both of these NA beers largely mimic their corporate flagship siblings. In the US, the NA version of Blue Moon is also excellent. And while these beers may not blow your mind, when it comes to NA beer that actually tastes like beer, they nail it. For American craft brewers, Sam Adams Just the Haze is a rare standout in the IPA style. 

I’d also recommend folks seek flavors beyond the traditional hoppy IPA or clean lager profiles that so often serve to highlight common NA off-flavors. Dark and sour beers, including those from Athletic Brewing, serve up flavor without sacrificing the beer experience and do a good job of masking any potential off-notes.

Managing your booze intake doesn’t mean settling for bland sips. If NA beer isn’t working for you, just remember water is always an option. Just make mine a hop water.

The post The Sober Truth: Most Non-Alcoholic Beer Isn’t Great first appeared on All About Beer.

There has never existed a brewer who dreamed the product of their sweat and labor would be enjoyed an ounce or three at a time. Beer flights or tasters have always been a necessary evil, such as at American style beer fests offering hundreds of beers. But no one would claim that beer samplers lend themselves to a great drinking experience. 

But that’s exactly the point of the beer flight, something I inherently understand but apparently lost touch with during my personal beer journey. Beer tasters aren’t about drinking, they’re about sampling, experiencing, trying new things. The objective is manifestly about quantity, not quality. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Like taking a one day hop-on, hop-off bus tour of a major city so you can cram a dozen attractions into three hours. Do they offer the full, immersive experience of slowly perusing every piece in a major art gallery? Of course not, but that’s not the point. 

The experience of ordering lets the drinker travel as many flavor paths as possible while giving them a reasonable enough understanding of the beers sampled. And like watching a packed 60 second trailer for a two hour movie, sometimes that’s all you need to get a beer’s measure. 

I once railed against tasters but no more. Because, truthfully, I loved tasters before I despised them. They offer an unparalleled window into new styles and opportunity to sample different flavors of beer even if imperfect in form. After drinking hundreds of samplers along the way, I started to prefer drinking pints or half-liters of beer, trying to understand and appreciate each beer on a slower, more in-depth basis. But two things changed that for me: the absolute explosion in the number of breweries and beers produced in the US today and spending less time in the pub and more time at home. 

When there were only a few thousand breweries in the states, it felt possible for a particularly engaged beer lover to sample beers from a substantial number of them. And though mathematically challenging, there hardly seemed a need to rush to try everything. You could savor each pint. Any case of FOMO was mild. But when that number ballooned to 8, 9, or more than 10,000 breweries, we quickly lost the ability to keep up with the breweries even in our own backyards. And when each of those breweries produce dozens if not hundreds of beers a year, it becomes not just a laughable exercise in futility but a numeric impossibility to try every beer. But we beer lovers are nothing if not pathological in our need to experience the new, the novel, the next. It’s in craft beer’s DNA. 

In addition to the natural FOMO that defines a craft beer drinker’s essence, I’m also excited to make the most out of my brewery visits after several years spent largely drinking in the confines of my own home. In my pursuit of the pint and home beers, I had lost touch with the pure chaotic joy of ordering samplers. In some places you might get four, six, or ten, or 14 different tasters on your tray. In others, you can choose to play nice with your palate or just decide to destroy it with your selections. It’s like buying one of those fly anywhere for a month deals, your imagination is the limit. 

With a return to ordering tiny tasting glasses of beer, I’m looking to attack my palate, to try things I would never buy in a store. Sure I’ll order your pils or helles to reset my palate but the rest of the list is gonna get weird. A barrel aged ESB? I’m in. Pastry pilsner? Let’s do it. Your grodziskie? Whoa, let’s not get too crazy. 

Experimentation defines craft beer’s essence. We all secretly love tasters even if we publicly dunk on them. I loved tasters before I hated them. And now I love them again. So let’s get weird. Maybe I’ll even drop in a hazy IPA.

The post Maybe Beer Samplers Aren’t Terrible After All first appeared on All About Beer.