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Comment by rationalist | Hacker News Reader

> I have so many great, local breweries

My city has a lot, but I personally can't share in them.

I will instantly vomit if I drink any local brews (in any locale). Same with whiskey.

I can drink nationally-distributed beers and vodka with no ill-effects.

I have no idea why. I'm jumping on this comment because I imagine there are some HN readers that might have a theory and I would be very interested in hearing them.

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I hate local beers. Local wine makes sense, there is terroir, a sense of place etc. Local beers are just some weird competition to see who can make the hopiest bitterest beer. I don't want to try a new lager every time I cross county lines, when I want beer I want something reliable.

Funny. I actually want to have a different beer every single time I get one to drink.

I'm the same, but that's partially a function of how rarely I drink these days.

I agree the style of beers made "locally" is weird, but the justification for local beer, on keg at least, is that it does seem hard to transport them successfully. In the UK beers do taste best on tap when you're within about 50 miles of the brewery. I'm sure they could be transported further safely, but in practice them almost never are.

I'm with GP on reliability though - I'd rather have a can of a known bitter than a local 'IPA' on tap that I don't know (and the other side of the bar doesn't care, or share a common language to decide) if is a 'proper' IPA, or one of these very pale, extremely fizzy things that seem to be in vogue and call themselves IPAs, when to me they're closer to a lager and almost any (non IPA-style) bitter would've been closer to what I expected. Sometimes I can tell from the label it will (or I fear it will, so don't try and can't say for sure) be like that, but certainly not always, and that's not always practical.

The UK beer market is quite different, especially when considering cask ale.

This beer is unpasteurised and still fermenting in the cask when it leaves the brewery! The carbonation of the beer comes from creation of CO2 during fermentation, rather than injection of CO2 post-fermentation.

This makes for a pretty unstable beer, that doesn’t travel particularly well and should be consumed reasonably quickly!

British cask ale is the most underrated beer. Amazing you can’t find it outside the UK. I have a feeling someone will make some form of it in the USA to differentiate.

Nothing like getting a proper pint of whatever is local.

People get it in their heads that small and local means good or at least better than the stuff mass-produced by MegaCorp, but that's not always the case. I think beer is a case where it's hard to beat Big Beer.

Heineken, the second-biggest brewery in the world, moved 231.2 million hectoliters of beer in 2021[0], or nearly 19,000 acre-feet of beer (!). How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?

[0]: https://www.craftbrewingbusiness.com/business-marketing/the-...

Well, one local example relevant to TFA and that I know of is the Bay Area.

Anchor, Drake's, 21st Ammendment, Lagunitas, Das Brew, Altamont, and Fieldwork all make better tasting beer than Heineken.

Funny, Lagunitas is now owned by the Heineken company. Heineken became the second largest brewer in the world after the merger of Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller.

Just about every major metro in the US likely has a brewery making better tasting beer than Heineken. That’s not what Heineken is going for.

Which is why I was refuting OP's statement:

> How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?

Yes, I was indeed agreeing with you.

Orrrr people have different tastes, and that’s ok. And generally the craft beer people are a bit snotty about it.

Heineken is a fine mass produced beer, but there are tens of beers that I would prefer.

There aren’t many locally produced lagers hardly anywhere, so it’s hard to compare. They take much longer to produce than ales, and require active cooling in most places.

All of them?

I think with big beer, you get consistency of product and usually pricing. That's great for some people who don't want to be fussing with beer. I used to care about tasting every obscure beer from a location, but over time I've started to care a lot less.

For wine and vintages, the absolute consistency is less of an issue. They aspire to some consistency, but a little variation is part of the romance.

The great thing is that in wine and beer, you get both ends. You get the familiar brands and the loony craft beers with outrageous labels. If I favour smaller producers, a good part of it is that I like to support younger businesses. Big producers pretending to produce young-business products is a bit meh though.

I was with you until you said Heineken tastes good

I'm really confused at the general lack of knowledge about this topic on HN. Heineken is one of the worst beers made, and local beers, while mostly not great, are certainly better. Look at untappd for statistically significant ratings.

A fresh Heineken from the brewery is as good as a Pilsner Urquel of Budvar - very, very good. It’s not the same stuff you buy at any gas station.

> Pilsner Urquel

Another middling green-bottle beer. Better than Heineken easy, but typically still worse than your local brewer will make.

I’ve never had a Heineken that wasn’t skunky.

> How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?

In my opinion: most of them. Heineken is not a good beer. It tastes similar to other mass-produced stuff: inoffensive bordering on flavorless. I'm actually stunned at the comment. It's like if I asked how many local restaurants make hamburgers better than Wendy's (Budweiser is McDonald's in this analogy).

Depending on the beer it also has terroir, from catching wild yeasts.

Same thing with beers made from local ingredients

Local ingredients must be incredibly niche though? The amount of US beer that must use imported UK, German, Belgian hops? Even if grown locally, the varieties. at which point this is like comparing Shiraz & Syrah; South African Merlot with Australian. Except without a record of it making a difference at all itself - intuitively it should be subtler - hops are a component, 'grape juice' is the whole thing. The water used for ale (more analogous to grapes really) does have a documented effect. That's probably more homogenous than it used to be, and the big boys probably use distilled water and add whatever mineral components they want, but certainly that could be significant for US vs UK microbreweries, or certain intra country comparisons.

local breweries are like the least competitive businesses out there; they seem to be really tight with each other since making money on beer is super hard these days

Beer is incredibly difficult to keep shelf-stable. International beers, unless very specific efforts are taken, will taste off. I heard a story that Austrian beer enthusiasts just assumed American beers tasted "skunky" because that's how they tasted after importing them. Time, temperature, and light are enemies. Anheuser-Busch has a dozen breweries across the US.

I'm not a fan of hops, but the PNW grows 96% of hops in the US--so it makes sense local breweries up there are known for IPA. Historically, beer styles leaned into local water mineral content; Pilsners from Germany/Czech Republic and Stout/Porter from Britain/Ireland.

Regional wines (local wines shipped widely) make sense and local beers do, too.

The skunky odor/flavor comes from light exposure to hops and it’s easily prevented with dark bottles or cans. Other herbs work well as preservatives and don’t get skunky at all. Beer can be shelf stable basically indefinitely if well kept, and often ages very well.

If it's easy to prevent, why is it so much more of a problem than for wine? Budweiser had a “born on date” and later switched it to a "freshest before" date. Other breweries insist on cold shipping--that's quite expensive.

It’s not really much of a problem. Beers that go skunky are typically sold in green or clear bottles. It really is the exposure of hops to light that causes it (and I have confirmed it with homebrew batches where some bottles skunked up rapidly while others lasted multiple years with no such effects, and even aged quite well).

For beers like Bud that are mostly sold in cans, and/or Bud Light often sold in brown bottles, the date labels are generally a marketing gimmick to distinguish from other brands without getting into these kinds of specifics (they come off beer-nerdy and that’s off putting to a lot of their target market).

Again, so this isn't confusing for anyone, this comment is totally wrong. Beer breweries do this because there's a clear change in flavor for beers left unrefrigerated and/or exposed to light.

They do change flavor over time, as do wines. It’s not necessarily a problem. My comment never claimed that there’s no change in flavor, only that flavor worsening and in particular skunkiness is trivially controllable. If you or anyone else disagrees with this, I invite you to try the oldest Deschutes Abyss you can find and describe exactly how it’s worse than the current year, or how you found even a hint of skunk in it.

It is a problem; that's why they put dates on them. You claimed it's for marketing, and it's not. Wine in supposed to be aged, most beers are not (sours and stouts are the exception). It's like eating day old food from a restaurant and pretending that's how the chef intended it to taste.

I've had almost every year of abyss going back to 2011. You picked a beer and a style that is intended to be aged, and the flavor changes over time much like wine. That has nothing to do with Budweiser, IPAs, pilsners, etc that are not supposed to be aged.

Too deep in the chain to reply directly but I opened a 2009 Abyss a few months ago and it was still delicious. The label even tells you to wait about 18 months after bottling before even considering whether to drink it.

Was it skunky? ;)

Wines (generally) don't use hops. Hops are such a strange flower (or weed depending on your view of hops) that provide a lot of very complex molecules that break down in interesting ways over time. At their best those molecules are flowery and subtly bitter. At their worst they break down into skunky things, some of which at extreme worsts are poisonous. Grapes have some complex molecules, but not the same sorts of bitter sulfides that hops do.

I had a few bottles of beer that I was drinking, but after some time even kept in an air conditioned room, they did spoil eventually.

Bottles in general are not as good as cans at keeping beer fresh.

That's absolutely not true. IPAs cannot be shelf stable past a few months if unrefrigerated. They start to lose the hoppy aroma and taste and taste more muted. The longer you go the more skunky it tastes.

It is fair that IPA hop aromas do diminish over time, it really depends on the beer how that affects its quality. But if you don’t expose them to light they definitely don’t get skunky, at any temperature over many years.

Which was of course the whole point of India Pale Ales. Chuck a load of hops in the beer, preserve it on a boat ride to India. Probably the hops aroma did diminish, but the beer didn’t go off.

And of course those beers were already way less hoppy. They weren’t for beer snobs, they were for colonizing.

The entire style was an attempt to make beer that would not go bad while on long unrefrigerated journeys to India from England, using extra amounts of the alpha acids in hops as a preservative.

Beer is super easy to make shelf stable. Most of the non craft beer you drink is pasteurized and re-carbonated. Some craft can be bottle conditioned, both I would consider shelf stable.

Water is an important ingredient in beer that affects the taste. Soft water is best for some beers, like Czech pilsner and similar traditional lagers, where as hard, mineral-laden water produces the best dark beers. The water in Dublin, Ireland is, for example, famously alkaline.

Of course it's possible, to a limited extent, to alter the mineral content of the water, but it gets expensive.

Hops, of course, are a key ingredient in beer, and they definitely do have terroir. The Saaz hops grown in the US are not identical to Saaz from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/earth-best-water-brewin...

It's trivial and cheap to make water harder, home brewers do it all the time to replicate specific styles. It's more difficult to make hard water soft.

Also while hops have terroir, hops are dried and vacuum sealed and kept cold so that they can be shipped with no change in flavor. (Except of course for once-a-year wet hop beers which truly are very local)

> t's trivial and cheap to make water harder, home brewers do it all the time to replicate specific styles

I'm aware of this. I did it for my ribbon-winning brews. It is cheap at the home brewer scale, but at commercial scales, maybe not so much.

> can be shipped

Sure, it's possible to get genuine Saaz hops shipped from the Czech Republic to California. Again, A home brewer might be willing to shell out top dollar for a few ounces, but cost and availability is going to be a much larger factor. I've know craft brewers to abandon making certain styles because of uncertain supplies of key hops, and being unwilling or unable to switch to a similar variety.

There's a reason why so many the American West Coast IPA became a style defined by Centennial, Cascade, Mosaic, Amarillo, Chinook, Simcoe, Strata or Citra, and not like English IPAs and their Target, First Gold, English Goldings and Fuggles

The popularity of American hops in American craft beers is in large part because Ken Grossman wanted to use American hops and wanted to set himself apart from European-style hops. To my knowledge that's pretty different from terroir as it's typically meant, and also Sierra Nevada is pretty far from where Cascade was grown when they started buying it.

By the time you get to Stone or Lagunitas and their West Coast IPAs, the hops are being packaged as I described and again we're not really dealing with terroir. The Chicago Lagunitas products tastes identical to the California ones.

Adjusting the water for different styles or consistency across production facilities is a thing that is done at commercial scale. I had a professor in college who figured out how to do that for Bass' UK production facilities in the 1980s.

Sure, within limits. I don't think anyone is going to be brewing a traditional pilsner in Ireland, though. At least not profitably.

> Local beers are just some weird competition to see who can make the hopiest bitterest beer.

It wasn’t always this way. I remember when our local breweries had a wide range of regular styles, and many specialized in whatever weird quirky thing they were into. That got me to explore Trappist styles, Flemish style sours, a whole bunch of English styles that I didn’t like at first but eventually became my thing because they’re so subtle, and a huge variety of different adjuncts regardless of hoppiness.

Local beer wasn’t (usually) about the locality of where it was brewed and fermented, it was about the locality of the humans involved and their whims. I think this still exists in some places, but IPA has basically become the “other beer” besides lager everywhere and it’s really a damn shame. And it’s basically ruined beer for me. I actually like IPA, but I’d lose interest anything that becomes so uniform.

Beer is best fresh, and usually the freshest beer is the closest beer.

Beg to differ, some beers age really well. A few years back I bought a couple of cases of gueuze that I'm keeping in a cellar. Every few months I drink one and it's now 8 years old. The evolution has been quite nice so far.

I was in Shelter Cove, CA last week. If you ran a contest to find the city in California that's most far away from everything as possible, Shelter Cove would be a solid contender. It has a brewery - actually the only restaurant in town most nights (there's another, but it's only open fri/sat/sun).

The beer was actually pretty amazing. What surprised me is that they do multiple stouts. It's getting hard to find dark beers in CA. My guess is that the coastal temps and generally overcast weather in Shelter Cove mean that the "local" beer tends towards what we normally think of as winter beer. Or it could just be that the owner likes porters and stouts as much as I do.

I wouldn't discount local beer. Unfortunately, I've never much cared for Anchor Steam, so it's hard for me to get worked up about the OP. Great tour though.

I prefer to give money to my neighbor than to someone who lives across the country or the world, when given the choice. That's it for me, everywhere has good beer.

There are almost two dozen breweries in my city and most of them have non-IPAs.

Yeast has just as much "sense of place" and "terroir" as influences wine. Starting yeasts generally come prepackaged from just a few mass factories and the vast majority of brewers just rely on that. Not enough brewers appreciate "sourdough" styles of beer that rely on local wild forms of yeast (and to be fair, in many regions of the world the local wild yeasts are poorly adapted for brewing and need a lot of work to get there), but yeast is such a short-lived organism that it adapts quickly to the environments you give it and what you feed it even when you are using fresh packets directly from the national factory as a baseline every brewing session.

Local brewers with even the smallest bit of Belgian influence often have at least some small idea of this. Brewers that enjoy exploring styles known as "farmhouse" or "spontaneous" or "common" are generally exploring truly local beers in both flavor profiles and execution.

If brewing was as lucrative as fancy wines, you'd probably hear a lot more about breweries staffing local yeast experts and building yeast labs the way fancy vineyards hire soil experts. (I do know of at least a couple that do. New Glarus is a stand out for a number of reasons, including that their commitment to local also means that they never distribute beer outside of Wisconsin.)

Unfortunately hops is a migraine trigger for me and drinking overly hoppy beers gives me headaches very quickly and last quite a while, so I stick to low hops beers, loggers, ales porter stouts etc. But good quality low hops beers can be hard to find now!

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