It’s very hard for me to reconcile. I love what craft brewing has done for the industry. But it has gone to a ridiculous and antithetical place. The culture has more in common with wine than beer at this point. It is no longer an “Everyman” drink. Waiting in line for releases. $10 and $15 pours. It’s a turnoff.
Why is this a bad thing? I have so many more options than the cheap beer I started drinking. The Everyman beer still exists and many people still drink it.
There are plenty of non $10 or $15 dollar pours to keep me happy. You don’t have to wait for releases. I only participate in lottery systems for limited liquor releases, screw the lines.
Walmart claims to have it in stock at their store in Mountain View, so I'm guessing it's sold here. I haven't gone looking myself, but Anheuser-Busch certainly distributes their big brands in California. It's possible that Busch itself just isn't that popular out here by mass market standards, though?
The high end of craft beer has flourished (Jester King, Perennial, Holy Mountain fetch insane prices imo on secondary markets and in person) but that didn't come at the expense of cheaper good beer too. Fremont makes 20 buck bombers but also puts out tons of Universale at $9 a six pack. Elysian too, but they've got ABI money.
One of my favorite 'hidden gem' stops when showing people around Padova, where I lived, was taking them to the agricultural high school where my mother in law worked prior to retiring. Along with a working farm, they produced wine - and even grappa - there. It was actually pretty good, and if you bought it out of a tank rather than bottled it was very cheap.
Americans especially were quite amazed to see wine being produced and sold at a high school.
Yes, there is price differentiation between the low end and high end now, but it’s not even close to the magnitude that wine has. And, besides, what exactly is wrong with that?
People willing to pay high prices are probably what makes it possible in the first place. I feel like the same thing happened with burgers where I live; gourmet burgers became a popular thing, and suddenly there are a lot of new burger places.
