The best beers of 2023, part 3

Why craft beer's struggles are really a 'success'. Craft is like ice cream, and coffee is like craft. Climate change beer shortages predicted by global giant. Some spicy beers of the week.

Happy Friday Beer Friends

We’ve just gone through the Spring Equinox, so that’s the cue for the next instalment of “beers of the year”. And then I want to take a look at a handful of compelling stories that, for me, help set the tone for the future of beer.

This batch of 13 beers is strongly influenced by the recent NZ Beer Awards, with a number of gold medal and trophy winners in here.

1. Brave Brewing Terrible Lizards IPA

Terrific beer. So well rounded, juicy, bitter, and fulfilling. It’s proper good. A friend texted the other day: “Finally got some Terrible Lizards. The hype is real. Great beer!”

2. Wilderness Russet Flanders Red

Layers of flavours — light balsamic acid quality, prune juice, apple skin, with a ribbon of red wine running through it. Real depth and relatively sweet for the style possibly from the 8% ABV.

3. Parrotdog NZIPA

Tastes like pure grape juice blended with finely blitzed grapefruit zest, an aerosol drop of diesel fuel and a pinch of cannabis leaf.

4. Beer Baroness Little Mighty Session IPA

So much flavour for a small — 2.5% — beer. Quite an impressive feat of brewing.

5. Shining Peak The Scarecrow WCIPA

The Scarecrow, apart from having the very best label, is pushing towards the extreme interpretations of the style. It’s dry and light, delicious and fruity,

6. Sprig & Fern Headliner

Quite simply the NZH-106 trial hop in this beer is going to be a star and this shows its qualities brilliantly. I see both Sawmill and 8 Wired have NZH-106 beers out now and I say: grab them!

7. Double Vision White Knight

So much going on in this white stout: coffee, cacao, vanilla, a nip of whisky … but it all comes together in a seamless delight.

8. Garage Project Chance Luck & Magic 2022

Like any third child, this is slightly sweeter than its siblings (and I say that as an eldest child!). I fully expect it to mellow into a thing of wonder.

9. Sawmill XPA

My post-golf beer of choice. Goes down an absolute treat and has great hoppy character on a super-light malt base.

10. North End Cuvee de Moor

 The flavour profile is somewhere in the middle of Coca-Cola, pomegranate juice, pinot noir and Christmas pudding. The texture is quite light and smooth, the acidity pin-point married to the sweetness. Get one now for Christmas.

11. Urbanaut Ixtapa Cola Sour

Fun beer — tastes like a cola but with a little sour slap at the end to remind you it’s not a soft drink. And it’s just 3.8% ABV.

12. Tuatara Regeneration Pilsner

Tightly constructed and while it uses Kiwi hops it goes for a more classical bitter-sweet profile.

13. McLeod’s Rustic Manor

Amarillo hops, to me, bring this spiced orange note. And Amarillo shines in this beer, which is light on the malt base just the way I like it. Super yum.

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Failures are a sign of success

If there’s a theme running through this dispatch it’s around the continuing maturity of the craft beer scene and I’ll start with this point raised by Boston Beer founder Jim Koch.

He was speaking at the Great American Beer Festival where he was asked about the “decline” in craft — with dollar sales for the segment down -1% in the last 52 weeks (ending September 19) and volume down -5.3% in the US.

The irony is that Koch sees the current environment being indicative of craft’s “success”.

“I know in the press people are writing ‘Oh, craft brewing, is it in trouble? Jeez, it’s not really growing. Oh my gosh, people are coming into the business, but people are going out of business.’

“And I'm here to say, when this all started, getting to that place was our wildest dream. That was what success looked like.”

Koch recalled the American beer industry before the early days of craft, when jokes were made about the low quality and lack of flavour and many had a “dystopian vision” of American beer becoming “more and more mass production, more and more mass marketing, lighter and lighter, less flavorful beer, dumbing everything down to the world of Coke and Pepsi.”

Now, Koch noted, with almost 10,000 craft breweries in the US and with a craft brewery in “pretty much every city, town, even village … Everybody in this country has almost immediate access to some of the best beers in the world. We are in an industry which is unquestionably a permanent fixture on the American beer landscape. It is not going away. It is solid, it is steady. It is permanent.

“Nobody makes a joke about American beer anymore,” he continued. “We are teaching the rest of the world how to make great beer and have a great brewing community, and that looks like success to me.”

This sentiment was something I reflected on when news of SOBA’s demise came through. Part of the reason SOBA had run its course was the fact that good beer was pretty much everywhere. Yes, there are still small towns in New Zealand without a craft/independent brewery — and maybe there’s an opportunity for someone? — but by and large “craft” is now part of the mainstream beverage industry here too.

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Beer of the week No 1

There’s a minor spice thread running through this week’s beers of the week.

First up Rhyme X Reason Yee-haw Habanero Saison. I’m a habanero guy, they are my favourite of all chilis. Perfumed, hot, flavoursome. And I love saison. So this mashup can’t go wrong, right? Of course not … it’s utterly freaking brilliant. The habanero is deftly presented and brings not only a gentle heat but a great layer of flavour. The saison base is totally there and never gets overwhelmed by the heat-spice so you get this perfect best-of-both-worlds scenario. I can see a few of these being consumed over the summer.

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Beer is like ice cream

I was chatting recently with Urbanaut’s Bruce Turner and he came up with the great allegory: beer is like ice cream.