But then cloudy ipa that looks like orange juice, beers made sour on purpose and other such stuff turns people off of “craft beer” and drives them to other things. People are sick of every bar having 7 taps full of cloudy ipas and not much else. So no, its not always “the other way around”.
I believe it is. ALMOST always. There may be a freak out there who went the other way. I mean, at least two Americans were stupid enough to move to North Korea. Crazy things happen.
First of all, I wasn't talking about a lateral move from one bad beer to another. There are craft beers that are considerably worse than Bud. I've been discovering them this year. Moving from sweetened beer with bizarre additions to industrial beer doesn't really count as a decision based on a maturing palate. Second, no one, or virtually no one, spends years drinking excellent beer--not Cap'n Crunch and Coconut-flavored blonde craft ale--and then turns to Bud.
Seems like there are way too many IPA's on the market, but there are plenty of craft alternatives and good factory alternatives to cloudy IPA.
And yet AB is a $650 billion company with worldwide presence. Yeah I guess they made a living out of crap beer and having no quality control or standards.
They made money selling bad beer with good quality control. Good quality control can't fix a bad recipe. Manischewitz probably has better quality control than some vineyards in France.
I don't call people who drink bad beer stupid, but I do criticize industrial beer manufacturers who make awful beer and try to fool people. The product isn't the cheaply-made beer. It's the cynicism and dishonesty. They promote this stuff to people who don't know anything about brewing as though it were comparable to things made with better ingredients.
I think people drink Bud and Miller not because they're stupid but because they don't care about beer. The vast majority of beer drinkers are thinking primarily about the buzz. I used to drink Miller myself. I was president of the Miller Club at my high school. We used to skip class, drink a bunch of Millers, and come back. Miller was okay with me because I was young, I only cared about getting drunk, the beer was very cold, and I always chugged it so I didn't taste much. Before I left high school, I was drinking a lot of European beer, and by college, I was done with American industrial beer for the most part. I found a couple of things that were acceptable in a pinch, but the more I learned about beer, the more unpleasant the big brands became.
I remember drinking a cheap beer called Red Cap that was not bad. The web says it's Canadian. I discovered it in college. I thought it was a bargain.
Incidentally, I had a beer labeled "Budweiser" overseas, and it was pretty good. It was canned. I don't know if it was some kind of illegal knockoff or it came from Czechoslovakia or what. It was not like Urquell. I know that much. The label didn't look or try to look like a Bud label.
