The sameness of craft beer

<< 2014-11-25 18:11 >>

Placa Reial, Barcelona

I can remember when and where I became seriously interested in beer. I'd been mildly curious for a while, but it was in May 2002, in Barcelona, that it got serious. Geir Ove and I were there for an IT conference, and quickly noticed that a number of bars were selling interesting Belgian beer. This was my first meeting with real Belgian beer, and I remember being deeply impressed by an old-fashioned-looking beer called St. Bernardus 12. I suddenly realized there was a lot more to beer than I'd been aware of.

Then we found a place on the Placa Reial called Glaciar, with a long shelf full of strange-looking Belgian beers. It was a lovely place to sit out on the square, and I suddenly decided I was going to taste my way through all those beers, from left to right. And over the course of the week, that's what I did, providing myself with a crash course in Belgian beer. What really impressed me was the variety of flavours, and from that moment on, I was hooked.

That row of bottles, Glaciar, Barcelona

Later I travelled to the US for conferences and to meet customers, and dived into craft beer, which at that point was a very nearly purely American thing. I explored English beers, cask ales, bitters, porters, and so on, and was perhaps even more impressed with the pubs. On later travels I tasted my way through Belgium, Germany, Japan, the Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine, etc etc etc. Everywhere I went, the beers were different, the food was different, the bars were different. What drove me was the joy of discovering the ways in which each country was different and had its own signature flavours.

Over the same period, craft beer started becoming available in Scandinavia. First in Denmark and Sweden, then later in Norway, too. These beers were conscious imitations of beers made elsewhere, such as US craft beer, Belgian beers, and to some degree English beers. I welcomed this as a liberation from the tyranny of the sameness of industrial beers, which only a few years before had been very nearly the only beers available by any means whatsoever in Norway.

Later, I went deeper still, discovering that I'd missed something major in Lithuania, and then that I'd also missed something big in Norway. And again what drove me was the delight in discovering how enormous and enormously varied the world of beer was. I'd been losing my enthusiasm a little, since there seemed to be nothing genuinely new to explore, but then suddenly I found that even after a decade of serious beer hunting there were entirely new things to discover.

ALEhouse, Riga

It was in this period that doubts were beginning to creep in about the way things were going. I went to Riga, and discovered that the highest-rated bar in Riga had only foreign craft beers. That is, English, American, and Scandinavian craft beers. The same ones, in fact, easily available in Oslo. And Copenhagen. Since I was in Latvia to try Latvian beers I didn't even buy a single beer, but just moved on to other places.

Then, Lithuanian brewers started making IPAs. That made me downright worried. Was Lithuanian beer culture going to disappear entirely, turning into ordinary craft beer of the kind available everywhere? And that before the world even knew it existed? This worry was one of the reasons I decided to publish my book. I felt it was important to tell both Lithuanians and foreigners that here was something important and unique that was much more valuable than simply copying what people were doing in the rest of the world. (To be fair, Lithuanian beer does not really seem to be headed the wrong way. So far.)

A similar thing has been happening in Germany. Over the last few decades German beer has been in what seemed like terminal decline. Berliner Weisse came to the brink of extinction, Oktoberfestbier turned into pils with a different name, and so on. Traveling around Franconia, the very heartland of artisanal German beer, we saw the signs of recently-closed breweries everywhere. Now, new German breweries are popping up, but they all seem to brew IPAs and wits. Is this progress? Partly, but not entirely. At least gose and Berliner Weisse now seem to be coming back from the dead.

Tap list at Kælderkold, Barcelona

Then, this week, I went to Barcelona again, for a different conference. Knowing that a number of very good Spanish breweries had sprung up in the decade since I was there last I was very eager try their beers. So on the first evening we went, as one does, to the highest-rated bar, BierCab, only to find that while it had an excellent beer menu, it was for the most part exactly the same beers you'd expect to find in Copenhagen. Only three beers were local, and the first one I tried was a standard American pale ale. It could have been a Mikkeller beer. It was nice enough, but there was little about the bar or the beer that gave me a sense of being in any particular place.

The next night we tried another bar: Kælderkold. I guess the Danish name should have warned me, but even so I was shocked to find that the beers were exactly the same as at BierCab, minus the three local ones. La Cerveteceria, described online as a place with many local beers, turned out to have exactly one. Only two places: Homo Sibaris and CatBar turned out to have any real selection of local beers.

In one way it's perfectly understandable that Latvians and Catalans want to drink foreign beers. I often do, too, in Oslo. But why should visiting foreigners seemingly prefer these beers? If their ratings are anything to go by, that's what they do. And why should it be exactly the same breweries all over Europe? It's always the same 3-4 Norwegian, Danish and UK brewers. The world of craft beer is a lot bigger than that.

Foreign beer, Kælderkold, Barcelona

So where am I going with this? Mainly to express my disappointment at how uniform the world of beer is becoming, and how little people seem to mind. One positive development here is the project Ny Nordisk Øl (New Nordic Beer), which aims to develop truly local Nordic beer flavours. Of course, as Martyn Cornell argues, that's not going to be easy when all the ingredients in beer are either easily exported anywhere or easily adapted (like water). Hardly anyone outside of western Norway knew a thing about kveik before our journey this May, yet very soon the first North American brewers will be brewing with it, and a Belgian yeast lab is already exploring it.

So are we necessarily headed for a world where beers taste the same everywhere? Probably we are, at least to some degree, because I don't really see how anyone today can develop a genuinely local beer culture. Quite possibly the last people to do it were the Lithuanians. But more about that in a later blog post.

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