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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

I think an issue the American craft beer scene has is quantity over quality. Some American beer places I go into have like forty different beers on tap, and are really proud of it. I find it hard to believe that forty beers are being kept fresh and live and maintained properly. Are they replacing them every few days or are the less popular ones in a range that wide sitting there for weeks? I feel like they're ending up quietly taking lower-quality shortcuts like using kegs rather than casks. I don't know why they don't focus on fewer, higher quality beers, rather than a ridiculously wide range.

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While the number of breweries has increased, but public consuming them hasn't really changed that much. Granted your casual beer drinker will go for a craft or micro offering now rather than your Bud or Miller Lite like they may have a decade or two ago, but that doesn't mean their tastes have really changed significantly. At the end of the day, most people can't tell the difference and most places don't care enough to properly care for the beer itself or the equipment. One of my biggest pet peeves are places that don't actually clean their lines often enough. It's something I can clearly taste and takes all of the enjoyment out of what should be a good beer.

In regards to number of beers on tap, not every beer is going to by in your standard size keg which points to some of your concerns. Chances are a number of the craft beers are in smaller kegs so they stay fresh, but more importantly take up less space. Refrigeration is key at establishments like that and ideally the kegs would be in their own fridge rather than just in the walk-in like many restaurants do it. Worst is the kegerators at the bar where the untapped gets are at room temperature. Not only is that not good for the beer, it's also horrible if you're one of the first pours from that keg.

I find it hard to believe that forty beers are being kept fresh and live and maintained properly

Asked honesty and earnestly, why?

Fresh beer ideally lasts about five days. Are these places getting through a whole cask of all their forty beers every five days? Doesn't seem likely to me. I'm guessing that they're using shortcuts like putting it into kegs rather than casks, Pasteurising rather than keeping it fresh, and using carbonation instead of pumping it naturally, in order to support their huuuuuuge ranges. If they focused on a smaller number they woudln't have to do this and they could have higher quality instead.

There are several styles of beer that can be stored such that they continue fermenting in storage and become a final, drinkable product by the time it gets connected to a tap-so this is HEAVILY dependent on what kind of beer you’re making, it’s not really applicable as a universal statement for the storage of several kinds beer. IPAs for example can last quite a long time if properly store (up to four weeks I believe?).

Beers brewed in casks obviously have a different fermentation cycle than something brewed macro systems but storage is less of a problem than you may think for brewpubs and gastropubs, generally speaking. Wits can last for a while if properly stored and rotated (physically as in turning the keg on end), for example. But even then, casks aren’t ideal for long term storage in many cases, and not all beers are suited for storage in casks as opposed to say: steel kegs.

(Spent quite a long time in the service industry and worked two large breweries in Texas)

On a slightly related note, I've had a bottle of Russian Imperial Stout (from Courage) in the fridge for over 6 years now. The intent was to do an experiment in bottle aging and also to time the opening to celebrate a birthday.

I do hope the cap hasn't leaked badly and oxidized everything. The bottle's been in the cold all the time though.

I’ve heard that if you’re going to do this put them in a cool area away from light exposure. So if you’re storing them in your kitchen fridge that gets opened and closed frequently that may or may not affect the aging and final taste.

THAT BEING SAID I’d love to experiment with this and see for myself and see if there’s any truth to this. Store one Imperial in my kitchen fridge for a year and one in my basement fridge where I’ve got other alchemy experiments (Read: homebrews) going on that very rarely gets opened, and is slightly warmer than the kitchen fridge, ask doctor girlfriend to do a blind taste test, submit results to the local home brew club for a fun beer chemistry discussion.

mad scientist grin

There may be a bit of confusion here, on tap, in the us, usually, just means coming from a keg. Having 40 draft lines is not that odd and beer lasts a long time in a keg. If you meant 40+ cask served beers, then that would indeed require a lot of turnover

Right, but that's what I mean. Instead of a couple of carefully produced natural cask beers, they have forty mass produced Pasteurised, carbonated kegs. Quantity over quality.

Question in search of some clarity: When you say “they” Are you referring to a specific beer made by a specific brewery when you refer to these pasteurized beverages?

At least as it pertains to the article, not all of Magic Hat’s products involve this brewing process, unless I’ve misunderstood you?

Craft beer bars I go into in the US in general. I'm sure there's tons of exceptions. But in general the beer scene in the US seem to prioritise having a great many taps, over having a smaller number of higher quality beers, and I think quality suffers because of that, through things like old beer, use of kegs and carbonisation.

Are you sure your personal taste and preferences (which are fine to have, everyone has different tolerances for different flavors and experiences with beverages) aren’t getting projected onto an entire industry here?

Of course it’s entirely possible that local craft bars could probably clean their lines a bit better, I’ve definitely experienced this when ordering a beer made by one of the breweries I worked for and immediately Noticing “nope that’s not how this is supposed to taste”, we offered to clean their lines for free because it directly affected perception of our product if people think our beer is skunky due to poor cleaning practices, and wouldn’t you know it the next pour tasted much better.

Many craft breweries do this, as well, sometimes employees of bars just take one beer off a line and out on a totally different style of beer without a thorough flush (often times just out of ignorance not knowing better) and you Will definitely taste the difference. So maybe this is a quality control issue with the service delivery and not the way beers are brewed and stored?

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I've had servers at 'brew pubs' give me a blank stare when asked if they had anything 'on cask' - pretty much everything is kegged here.

I really miss the richer, softer head and 'alive' flavor from a proper cask ale. Well, not that anyone should be out drinking socially these days, anyway.

In the US, casked "real ale" is rather uncommon and many people prefer kegged and force carbonated beer. While I enjoy and seek out casked beer when it is available, most people I've talked with actively avoid it with comments of it being "flat" or "warm". Even the places that have 20+ taps (kegs) will only have 1 or 2 casks at most, but typically no casks. More often than not, casks are only available for special events/beer releases.

Are you from the UK? Cask is considered a sub genre in the US, and not something to shoot for in the general case here.

Most consumers here don't want a cask beer, but instead a carbonated one from a keg. If you serve them a cask beer they think it's flat. There's a craft brewery near me that specializes in cask (shout out to Hogshead in Denver if you've never been), but they're embracing the niche aspect of that rather than attempting to be "what beer should be". It's not a case of cheaping out.

Yeah. Oh right I thought 'craft' sort of implied 'cask' and the kegs were a cheap shortcut, but maybe the taste in the US is more for carbonated beers.

I edited the above, but if you ever find yourself in Denver, check out Hogshead. Really great brewery focusing on cask beers. Haven't had a bad beer there.

Cask is a sub-genre in the UK as well, limping along with a hyper-nationalist identity. Dude is feigning ignorance.

Correct. Even in the UK there are plenty of craft brewers who don't produce cask beer. Nobody really thinks all beer should be distributed in casks and other storage methods are only "low-quality shortcuts", despite chrisseaton's four posts in this thread pretending to be shocked.

Even "sub genre" is overstating it. Cask is extremely niche in the US. The vast majority of establishments do not regularly serve cask beers, no matter how craft focused they are.

PC seems very confused about how niche cask ale is (even in the UK), but the point does still stand to a degree.

Some styles do have quite short shelf lives, namely the ubiquitously popular IPAs. Even with miniscule DO (dissolved oxygen) levels - breweries measure in PPB - you have a few weeks until staling can be reliably discriminated. Distribution takes a couple of those good weeks right off the top in many cases, making stale beer a real issue for people that like hoppy styles.

Much of the trendiness is beer now is due to limited distribution. You can't get Pliny on the East Coast, and you can't get Alchemist or Treehouse on the West. You have to have them specially shipped, leading to one of the worst dick-measuring contests in history with the bottle-trade scene. Those breweries forgo huge sales because they insist on controlling distribution such that quality won't suffer.

It is absolutely a real issue.

Also, any homebrewer can tell you this first hand. Not just for hops, but delicate malt flavors are often at their peak about two weeks from brewing, just enough time to fully ferment and then mature cold in a keg for a few days. Good taprooms can get you this experience as well, but beer trends are decidedly against delicate malt character, though crispy bois (aka pilsners) are having a moment.

Distribution takes a couple of those good weeks right off the top in many cases, making stale beer a real issue for people that like hoppy styles.

I'm not sure I can concur with this, distribution of spirits is an incredibly well solved problem and a speedy one, taking the forms of self-distribution, "hot-shot" distribution/delivery and wholesale distributors. They vary in scale and they all serve different customer segments in the marketplace. I'll concede that wholesale distribution can definitely sometimes take longer than the other two distribution models, but not by a significant magnitudes that it affects the product as much as many would presume, especially with refrigeration technology able to keep the product from heating up and suffering from basic chemistry doing its thing as the beer "cooks" in transit once it's been kegged and sealed

E.g.

Self-distribution models if your local state allows it lets brewers sell right out the back of their vans or right off site to any bar or patron that wants to buy and has the proper licenses to sell alcohol (I did this in Austin for 3 years driving from Austin to Houston weekly with a van full of kegs to bars that had made an order only days prior).

Hot-shot delivery isn't too different from this only it's usually upstart distributing companies (sometimes former brewery workers who split off, bought a van and got appropriate licenses) who will buy kegs and flip them to consumers.

Wholesale, name speaks for itself, but they often sell direct to retailers.

Ultmately though, alcohol distribution is a very well solved problem.

We must live in different parts of the country, I don't know a single craft brewery that brews 40 different beers at once, not even the huge multimillion "stretching the definition of craft" brewery around here. It's typically 4-10 at once around here. I don't think even Treehouse has that many and they have a ton (and limit everyone to 2 pours each because of the huge amount of traffic they get)

This is the kind of craziness I see when I travel to the US

https://www.taptrail.com/world-record-for-most-beer-taps/

I really struggle to believe they keep 366 beers in the best condition possible. And I don't get why it's a goal in the first place. I don't think anyone is making a meaningful choice between 366 beers and I bet they often get a disappointing one when they select something that nobody else has picked in the last week.

Well, that's a bar, not a brewery, and the topic here is breweries, not bars.

If a bar has the sort of foot traffic/clientele/supply chain to support 366 different beers on tap then good for them, some do, it's not an easy operation to run. They also usually buy mini-kegs for quick turnover. If they are serving garbage quality beer that's been sitting for months then they probably wouldn't be in business.

The place I used to frequent that has around 25 beers on tap usually had a turnover of about 50% of taps/week from what I saw.

Shrug the Delirium Café in Brussels has 2000 beers on tap.

Agree that 20+ taps is more likely a bar than a brewery. Though I think that a sixtel is more likely being used than a mini-keg.

The original comment didn't say anything about breweries.

I worked for a pub for a while that did beer and wine only with 20 taps. We definitely had the occasionally stinker that sat around for way too long (if it sat around too long, it would start getting poured for the staff and regulars on the house), and we had our usual suspects that would pop almost every day. By and large though, it was rare for any given keg to last over 4-5 days.

40 is a lot more than 20, but we were a relatively small bar that didn't even open on Sunday.

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