Thanks for the pic.
Now imagine that each one of those screens represented 8.85 people. ...
i don't like seeing .85 of a person. it's always awkward and really hard to not stare at where the missing limb used to be.
It is however brewed to style though on a consistent basis. And they have won awards for it, more than once. Therefore, other brewers and judges feel the same.
the one thing that's a bit funny, *in my opinion,* is when i see someone who says that they brew to style. many people are attempting to create new styles every time they brew. so you take something like a lager, make it even more tasteless (by the way, lagers don't have to be completely tasteless), or do the same with a pilsner, and then call it american. now we have created the american lager, or even worse the american light lager, and it's crap. but hey at least we're brewing to style right?
if someone brews something "new" these days in the craft world and it's crap, they would never be able to continue with that crap style. it wouldn't make it. the reason why these ****ty beers and their styles came into being has more to do with businessmen making cheap beer, government regulation at the time, and WWII taking up most of the countries grains, which meant very little leftover for the small brewery. before that american style beers, even craft beers at the time, were not flavorless.
I hate them because I'm jealous, I'm jealous because years and years ago some dude made a great batch of beer. Obviously it was good. With this batch he blew up and took over the world made a bagillion dollars (if you don't know a "bagillion" is a lot of money) and was able to start buying a lot of cool **** to make more and more and more beers. I'm jealous of the bagllion dollars they made which allowed them to hire scientists and really nice shiny equipment. I'm jealous that they were able to take their home brew and magnify it by like a gabillion x2 (which if you didn't know is a lot of beer x2).
Look up the history of AB. it was not a craft brew that sold a bunch of money. it was a soap maker (the A 1/2) who bought out a local brewery, and whose daughter married a brewery supplier (the B 1/2). So it was basically two businessmen who saw their chance at a blooming business right after prohibition was lifted. They then settled on one of the cheapest beers to make, and because of their already accumulated wealth and affiliations, were able to streamline their product and delivery of that product way better than any of the smaller breweries at the time. Not to mention that they had some accumulated wealth and influence in order to buy more of the leftover grains (the ones not being used to fuel the troops) than the small breweries could.
summary of the above book:
1) they invented the crap style, and keep to that style, that doesn't make them praiseworthy.
2) they were never craft brewers or homebrewers who happened to make it big. they have been about profits since the beginning, never about making good beer.