When you first got into craft beer.....what has changed?

That’s the “craft beer everywhere” part :wink:

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You’ve basically nailed it - I agree with every single one of your points. Thank you. I will bundle “not even a fucking beer any more” into “styles I don’t care for”, and then all I can add possibly is:
+ more people aware of craft beer, you’re less of a wierdo in a small clique.
- more people aware of craft beer, sometimes it’s harder to get a beer at your favourite bar.

(Oh, and to get the ‘+’ and ‘-’, I started the lines ‘\+’ and ‘\-’)

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‘been seafarin’ in Theydon’s craft beer pubs since before he was a member of this site!

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What about those sexy leg showin jorts?

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Back then: “Friends, we need to pool our money and mail order awesome ticks from Belgium!”

Now: “Dang, there are 50 beers I need to try that just came out this week by 10 breweries within 25 miles of my house.”

Back then: To newcomers, “You won’t like this. It’s IPA and very bitter… Yeah see. I told you.”

Now: Newcomers, “Hey, where can I get more of that sweet hazy IPA?”

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I started ticking around 2010 in Belgium. Back then there were close to zero imports and about maybe 5 breweries making beers outside of traditional Belgian styles in Belgium. The hype for rare lambiek existed but was still rather limited. With one exception beer festivals with foreign breweries didn’t exist.

Since then the import scene has exploded to unbelievable heights. Multiple bars in town serving craft styled beer from all over Europe & USA. Multiple stores offering a vast selection of these, beer festivals boasting breweries from anywhere from Russia to Brazil. Cantillon / 3 Fonteinen hype has exploded to an embarrassing extent.

Where once you needed to trade by post for Alesmith Speedway and stouts were nearly unicorn rare, we have bad BA version on draft now and cans of it in stores.

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-more people aware of craft beer, think that using Untapp’d or having had something different than lager makes them experts. Not trying to be snobby here, I love the fact that people are exploring the beer shelves in the local supermarket and like to talk about how they liked Leffe Blond, but if they then go on to rave on about how this year’s batch/vintage is so much better than last year’s, and then go on to rate that ‘vintage’ on UT, that makes me cringe. Especially when they say it tastes a bit like an IPA.

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I’ve had one of those - it was malty and hoppy, right? I is expert!

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I like that :slight_smile:

Agree with you on these. Barrel ageing especially often done with wood chips and when it’s done right you pay for it.

From a local perspective:

  • Many more breweries (think we’ve almost tripled in Nebraska since I started about 5 years ago)
  • Much more selection at bottle shops (have a Shelton Brothers Distributor now)
  • Prices have gone up like crazy
  • Slightly more educated locals
  • More mediocre stuff being put out as quickly as possible
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The emergence of the urban seafarer accurately identifies the locus of craft beer’s most dramatic cultural transition. It’s like a zero AD, (or PUS, Post Urban Seafarer) indicator in time.

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Oh yeah about 15 years ago I was mail ordering on Belgianshop.

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That’s it Shag! Ring up Bruno for the haul!

In short, there has of course been a huge popularity shift in only a couple of years. I joined the site in 2013 and had been deliberately trying new beers regularly since 2009ish. In 2009 there was nothing much of note in Cardiff - maybe Zerodegrees brewpub - now there is a very distinct craft beer area. I first tried a Kernel IPA around 2012 and found the flavour really surprising - really intensely bitter. There really wasn’t anything else like that in the UK at the time. (I’m not sure Kernel even make beers like that now. But maybe that was just my newbie palate at the time.) The only beers coming from the US really consistently were Sierra Nevada, and I thought they were pretty good.

Less good stuff:
needing to be totally on the ball to get tickets for festivals.
Queues at beer releases.
New experts who feel that they need to snobsplain beer or beer styles to me.
Attitude shift in bar staff in London from friendly purveyors of booze to more attitudey. Perhaps due to popularity of beer and therefore a change in the type of people applying for roles - cool rather than geeks.
Not being able to try all the new beers I want to try because a) they sell out the same day they hit the shops or b) there are so many and I value staying alive.
In recent times almost all the focus has been on NEIPA and pastry stouts. Sometimes chasing these styles can get tiring and repetitive.
Cantillon and 3F is now even more impossible to get outside of the breweries, and prices have risen exponentially.

Good stuff:
Crazy selection of beers available. Supermarkets like waitrose have interesting beers.
Beers that used to be total whales when I started using RB are now either sitting on shelves all over the UK (e.g. speedway, westvleteren 12, kbs and cbs) or have been easily available (e.g. goose island bcbs and variants, bells expedition, dark horse bba plead 5th). These were all beers I at one point honestly thought I might never try. Now the fact that I thought that seems silly. I suppose you could see that as a bad thing too - the mystique of those classic beers has totally gone. But a good thing is that their easy availability means that they get non-hype scores.
I never got on to the trading scene but it seems that people are now doing it less and drinking local stuff instead. It’s so easy to make a good NEIPA, for example, that you have loads of local choice. I assume this is a good thing for people who used to trade because they save money?

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Nope. Still gotta get beers that are hard to get. You should see the Firestone Walker sour/wild bottle menus! For those it’s fly to LA and uber to the Venice venue. Similar for Portland and Seattle. For many San Diego beers it’s on-line order. Only way I could get Mocha Eclipse. So money not really being saved, but the days of saving up shipping boxes and agonizing over whether the illegal act would be caught out are gone. :))

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I remember when I went to Toronado in SF. It was amazing. The taplist seemed nuts, and if we could only get a bottle from the bottle list. That feeling is impossible now. Partially due to living in Portland. It’s changed a lot. I used to trade 4% Utah beers with ease for other locals. Now, trading seems much less common and only for a few beers. The overall situation is much better, but I do miss those early days. My wife and kids were in Japan one week and I was in Utah. I excitedly drove around grocery stores and state stores finding I think, four new ticks. It felt like a victory.

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I can barely describe the differences. I guess I can say I started drinking craft beer in 1985 (when craft beer primarily meant imported beer) and the only place you could find decent imports were specialty stores (in most stores imports meant Molson Canadian, Moosehead, St. Pauli’s Girl, or Fosters Lager). No such thing as brewpubs and the only locally brewed beer for me was Hudepohl, Sterling, Falls City, and Falstaff. I never dreamed of buying quality beer at a small town liquor store (let alone a grocery store). At most, I could find 4-5 styles of beer (pale lager, cream ale, dark lager, pilsner, and maybe a Guinness or an import Bitter if I was extremely lucky).

I would still be a beer drinker had things not changed but I thank my lucky stars every day it did. I don’t think the 21 year old me would believe that I went into a grocery store today and drank a pint of Gose (which I would have had no idea what that was anyway).

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First got into “craft beer” back in the late 1990s…was just trying to find something different from the beers i had been forced to drink when i moved from Scotland to Atlanta back in 92.
Things like SNPA were a godsend…and i had to drive miles to get it . Other stuff like SA Scotch Ale…had to special order though a local gas station ( thanks Ed).
So of course its a whole new universe as far as choice and styles are concerned. I can get a better choice of craft beer at my local convienience store than i could get driving all over S.Atlanta.
But somethings have changed…for the worse IMO.
The camaraderie among micro drinkers…the battle against “Big Beer” etc.
But i guess we won and its weird to acknowledge we won and “Big Beer” gave up and wanted to do craft.

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I remember those days! Hearing some rumor that a liquor store an hour away had old dusty bottles of European ticks, and planning a trip up there and finding a bit more than expected. Then driving home feeling like I’d just scored some rare signed first edition comics that I absolutely needed to share with friends.

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