Like all other huge events requiring the social gathering of thousands of people, the Kennett Beer Festival was canceled this year. Instead, the festival organizers put together a novel concept of selling “backyard mixed cases” consisting of 48 different beers from 48 different breweries.
Note that I didn’t state that there would be 48 different styles of beers, and this was something that Autumn Arch strongly considered when selecting a beer to send to this year’s brewfest. I suspected there would only be a few styles but tons of variants of those.
I strongly feel the typical American craft beer enthusiast focuses heavily on just a few styles. Most of which are variations of IPA. This is an interesting phenomenon, and not unlike European countries which see broad loyalty to just a few styles like Helles, Pilsner, and Wheat.
In the interest of doing something different, yet strangely conservative, (sometimes to our regret and other times to our delight), we sent a humble Belgian Tripel up to the Kennett Backyard Brewfest. I was fairly certain that a majority of the Brewfest cases would be IPAs and a majority of those would be the New England style, which is the most popular style among a broad spectrum of craft beer drinkers (I don’t know any breweries that would dispute this).
So we hung our hats on a Tripel - fruity, certainly not bitter, incredibly sexy, and possessing great ester and phenol aroma. The classic Belgian Tripel is quite the badass beer. In fact, I’m required to disclose that Belgian Tripel is a hard beer for hard men. #fact
What’s not to like? (assuming it lacks defects or other atypical offensive characteristics)
While it was a calculated decision to stand a bit out from the IPA crowd, I knew Autumn Arch risked the ire of the hype beer enthusiast. And thanks to the internet, there is a way to quantify the magnitude of this ire!
Enter Untappd (a fun app for craft beer fans to rate their favorite and least favorite beers).
Here is my summary of observations on Don’t Ride Triples data collected from the release date through October 2020:
This piece of the chart is from the first few days after release in our tasting room. Don’t Ride Triples was on tap (just a single keg) and available in 4-packs to go. Folks who go out for beer releases typically have at least a slight affinity for the brewery, and because they already have a favorable impression of the beer, it tends to get a slightly higher rating (seriously, would you go out to a Budweiser release? Even if they made a NEIPA? Nope, you wouldn’t.). Mean is 4.07 stars (represented by the black line).
October 3 and 4 - This was the weekend of the Kennett Brewfest case pick-up. A lot of folks had backyard gatherings and consumed copious amounts of amazing beer. There were no inhibitions and Untappd scores were brutally honest. I think said copious quantities of beer also contributed to a high level of variability. A true statistician may be tempted to omit some of the low outliers, but since this was a beer festival (and we all know what happens at those), I thought it was prudent to keep all the ratings in the chart. Mean is 3.48 stars.
The steady state. This represents about 3 weeks of check-ins after Kennett Brewfest and is comprised almost entirely of the slower brewfesters and folks checking in from the Autumn Arch tasting room. I’d say this section of the graph represents the average Untappd user experience (if there is such a thing as an average Untappd user). The data levels out between the two previous means at around 3.65 stars.
So the question is - knowing what we know now, do we stand by the decision to send a humble Tripel to the Kennett Brewfest instead of a style more closely associated with “hype” beer?
Yes, we definitely do. Purely on the basis of doing something different, this was a good decision in my mind. However, I think a big take-away for Autumn Arch is that the craft beer market’s appetite for “unique and complex” beer is insatiable. And we have some plans over the coming months to meet this thirst head-on.