Excuse me? This is supposed to be a kind of fancy eatery! Sure they can bring people in with the food, but everyone I know orders craft beer from other places when they eat there. To serve SOUR, infected beer is beyond lazy, it's terrible business! They started getting bad reviews about it. If they don't change something, pretty soon they will have a bad reputation and lose more customers.
This reminds me of a place near me. For years I basically didn't even go there because their beer was terrible. They had a great location (in a strip mall next to a big movie theater), decent food, but the beer sucked. They would market macro beer specials for happy hour instead of their own stuff, and their menu would highlight the wine pairings for their entrees.
Luckily, as craft beer really "hit" and as the market became more discerning, they saw the light. I don't know if they changed brewers, but their house beer improved, their guest tap list improved from macro to a really good craft list, and now it's a place I'll frequent. Sometimes competition spurs improvement.
Perhaps you should talk to the managers at this brewpub. Tell them your concerns. Ask them to look at the sales figures of the other craft taps versus their own. Ask them to calculate what the improvement would be to their bottom line if more of those pints were their own stuff, as in-house beer makes MUCH better margins than craft that they're buying and merely marking up. I'm sure they'd see the light.
I agree with you bwarbiany. Those style guideline things are forced limitations that do not make sense, therefore competitions also do not make real sense to me. It is like cooking. Telling me that I can only use this and that ingredient in my apple pie? Or my steak can only be seasoned with this and that and not pan fried but only grilled.... that wouldn't make sense at all, same for trying to force guidelines on beers.
I don't know who you're agreeing with, but you've stepped so far beyond what I said in my previous post that it sure ain't me.
Nobody is telling you what to put in your pie. But if you go to a pie competition and one person brings apple pie, another brings chocolate cream pie, another brings rhubarb, the fourth brings chicken pot pie, and the fifth brings shepherd's pie, how are you going to meaningfully make a comparison between them?
The Kansas City Barbecue Society has guidelines for barbecue competitions. Those guidelines are actually
quite different from what you'd probably make at home or eat at a restaurant. That doesn't mean the barbecue you make at home has to be to "KCBS" expectations.
Competitions serve a purpose. I often don't enter because I haven't brewed "to style". But when I brew something that fits a style, it's good to get the judges' feedback. The most recent competition I entered, I found myself reading the feedback and most of it was things I felt were accurate, and thus it helped to validate my own taste. There were a few score sheets that I thought were perhaps off, but I'm going to take those sheets and reflect on them while tasting the beer to see if maybe there's something accurate in there that I missed.
I see your points. I don't necessarily see it as an"entertainment" factor but more as "experience." The nearest brewery to my house is about a mile away. The beers are decent - no one is standing in line on a Saturday morning at 5AM for a rare, limited release, and up until recently, they contracted with the nextdoor pizza parlor to deliver pizzas since they didn't have their own kitchen. However, it has always been a great place to meet up with friends after work for a pint or two. They have board games, a couple of TVs, and decent beer. Even though their beers don't blow me away and I don't seek them out anywhere other than the brewery, I still go because of the experience I can have there. There are better breweries making amazing beers within 10 miles of my house, but sometimes making the long 10 mile trek
)) for great beer won't dissuade me from visiting the nearest brewery for the experience of pints with friends.
Then there are local taprooms. We have a decent one in my town. Beer is generally good. Never selling anything infected or other obvious flaws. But not breaking new ground either. Beers are decent fits to style and they have usually 11 on tap of which about 7 are standards. They are always busy and seem to have a decent business. Just celebrated 6th anniversary and every years seems to be stronger than year before. I go to this brewery at least once a week and know most of the regulars, taproom staff and brewers at least by sight. Dog friendly so often it's a stop on my dog walks. I like the experience even if I'm not interested in posting pics of my pints on social media or texting homebrew friends about this awesome new beer they have to try.
This is a good point. What I think it really underscores is that we're not always looking for world-class beer that blows me away. There is a certain level beyond which beer is "good enough" to warrant going back to a brewery.
The same is true of restaurants. I don't eat at fancy restaurants all the time. In fact, I don't eat at "amazing" restaurants all the time. I do have a minimum floor of taste/quality, however, that will keep me going back to a restaurant.
Near me is Laguna Beach Beer Company (which non-intuitively is 15 miles from Laguna Beach). The beer is decent. It's not stellar. There are a few recipes that I think are subjectively not so great, but the beer doesn't have any outright flaws or off flavors. It's easily a good enough joint that if I want to go grab a few pints, I'll happily go there.
My take is that the brewery OP is describing does NOT meet this level of minimum quality. I was just at another brewery here in OC a few weeks ago that after a single pint, my girlfriend and I walked out and went to another brewery nearby because the beer was simply not good. It wasn't a subjective assessment. The beer just wasn't good. Yet there were plenty of people in the joint.
From my reading, the OP's description of all the beer at the pub being "sour" (the objective flaw) was hyperbole inserted to make a point.
The staff at the brewery and no other drinkers there can detect it?
Sorry, but I'm somewhat skeptical. But maybe the beer did suck and he's right, I'll never know, but MY point was that the whole comment seemed somewhat snobby, even if the OP didn't mean it that way.
My apologies are offered to all that are offended.
And I never wrote that Bud was flawed so I don't know where that comment is coming from.
My impression of the OP was that he was talking about objectively flawed beer. And I will tell you that I've been at MANY breweries over the years that have objectively flawed beer, and remained in business. Perhaps some are like Homercidal's example [that I echoed with a brewpub example I used] above where the brewer and the servers know it's bad beer but they're making enough money not to fix it. Perhaps they just don't realize that it's bad, and it's a market where the consumer doesn't realize it, and they're surviving. But it seemed like he was discussing objective rather than subjective flaws.
FYI I wasn't insinuating that you said Bud was flawed. My take was that you were calling them out as a beer that was subjectively bad--to the palate of a typical craft beer drinker--and suggesting that perhaps OP was substituting his own preferences for those of other drinkers in regards to a beer that you're skeptical that it's objectively bad.
My point is that there are breweries that survive for years with objectively flawed beer, so it's not necessarily correct to assume that what he's tasting isn't real. I've tasted objectively bad beer at many breweries.
And don't worry, I wasn't offended. You'll have to try FAR harder if you want to offend me!