Snow Day reading about craft beer turns into a blog post

Another snow day today so while the boy is upstairs on his iPad I got to read an interesting local blog post about weirdness in the local craft beer trade. I've read some interesting whispers about things that are happening locally that are quite sad and disturbing and I'm pleased to see someone was brave enough to put their thoughts down.

Very little of what the author wrote surprised me. She was spot on in her reporting that micro-breweries are putting out mediocre beer just to have something new to market. If you can't establish why you wanted to become a craft brewer with a signature beer or two, drinkers are going to find you out when you keep putting adjectives into cans instead of decent product.

Read the post I linked to, it summarizes a lot of what I've been micro-ranting about on social media for the past few years.

Here's my post about Trophy Beverages from 2014.

When I worked for McGee's back in the nineties, there was a lot of cooperation and synergy between retailer/wholesaler and the few micro-breweries in Columbus at the time. We were trying to break even at best, which did not happen to McGee's in the long run, and introduce good products to our customers. And if a brand did not work, we did not recommend or support it. Sorry to Gambrinius who had some massive sanitation issues when an attempt was made to bring the brand back.

Every Friday turned into a beer tasting, we'd open up the new stuff, people would bring in beer that they had acquired on the travels to The Party Source or out of state and we'd discover what was happening in other states or a cool foreign beer we could not get in Ohio. Sure it was illegal to do it so openly, it was all new.

Our shop put on one of the first outdoor beer festivals in Columbus in 1996 when we pitched a couple of tents in the Bank Block parking lot behind the shop, invited the local brewers and wholesalers to pour their stuff, had a homebrew competition and we had a reasonably good time doing it.

There was allocated product, but no one really went without. No retailer really tried to hoard all of any given release, our customers did not buy up all of our product for their use. There was sharing, and that spirit seems to have disappeared. The changes of the industry and the drinking culture bros who go for the trophy brews over anything else, is flattening my interest.