Thanksgiving is a time to reflect and give thanks for everything (and everyone) you are grateful for. It is a time to spend with the people you love, to enjoy good food, and of course, to indulge in a few good beers.
This year, be sure to impress your guests with a variety of Autumn Arch beers to enhance the Thanksgiving dining experience.
As the hazy and humid summer settles in over Newark, the Autumn Arch team took a long weekend break in July to reflect and recharge. Since one of our partners lives in Minneapolis, we decided to take the show on the road (with some stops in Iowa beforehand and Montana afterwards).
A couple points of interest:
Firstly, Minneapolis is quite the fun little city. Plenty of lakes, breweries, wide boulevards, and sunny skies (albeit slightly hazy with wildfire smoke). Tons of early 1900s buildings and neat midwestern architecture. This is something I’m a little jealous of since Delaware has very few old warehouse style buildings that would make good breweries. And the citizens of Minneapolis have definitely taken advantage of this.
Secondly, it was only a year ago that the city was rocked with protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd. We drove over to where it all happened. It looked like the site had remained relatively untouched with the streets closed off and flowers lining the sidewalks. Amid the serene calmness, it was hard to believe this tiny corner sparked a nation-wide movement a mere 14 months ago.
The break from Newark was good. Plenty of candid discussion on the where Autumn Arch is today and where it’s heading tomorrow. Tons of excitement there.
We had planned this little break back in the middle of winter, and now that it has come and passed, we all agreed that it was very much needed after all the furious activity involved in running a business through 2020. It was a collective deep breath before the start of race. A re-focus on what’s really important.
We hope you had a chance to hit the reset button this summer (or at least the pause button for a few days). COVID’s not over; things are getting expensive, the weather is weird, and craft seltzers are here to stay :) But so is exceptional craft beer at Autumn Arch. Drop by and tell us about your summer. We’d love to hear about it.
PS. Run Club on Wednesdays is a perfect opportunity to do this - you’ll have our undivided attention for 4 miles plus some serious hanging afterwards (with post run refreshments of course).
Newark, DE. The latest nascent craft beer trend seems intriguing - “performance beers” are light beers with added electrolytes, kind of like adult Gatorades. But there’s no way they can be nearly as effective in hydrating the body because the presence of alcohol (hello! It’s beer!) will always be a dehydrating factor.
Will these performance beers really take off and be the next hard seltzer? Not sure, but I suspect not. Although, feel free to call me out if we put Arctic Blitz Belgian Wit on tap this summer.
Over the last 20 years, I would argue that the lead beer in the craft beer charge has passed the baton per the following (approximate) schedule:
late 90s - Pale Ale and dry-hopped IPA
early 2000s - West Coast IPA
mid 2000s - New England / Hazy IPA
early 2010s - Barrel Aged Sours
mid 2010s - Dessert Stouts
mid 2010s - Fruit Smoothie Beers
2019 - Fruited Hard Seltzer
2021 - Performance Beers?
It’s easy to see that the 1990s Sierra Nevada Pale Ale craze was going to inevitably turn into hazy New England IPAs, even if a bunch of traditional breweries didn’t want to admit it. It’s a logical chain of evolution.
As the craft beer market grew and pulled in different and varied tastes, mainstream barrel-aged sours and dessert stouts were able to take hold and generate excitement. I think the craft beer market had really matured at this point, with 5000+ breweries in the U.S., it was common-place to find a few craft brews in the typical American’s picnic cooler. In fact, your peers may have been disappointed had you NOT included those craft brews.
Not everything lived up to the hype, and thankfully, a few strange beer inventions died a quick death (i.e. Brut IPAs). This is part of craft experimentation…some things just don’t work.
This all leads to my main point. At some point, you have to throw it against the wall to see if it’s going to stick. It’s fun and usually interesting.
What is Autumn Arch going to throw against the wall? We have a couple things in the works, but I’m not disclosing anything until after I finish this performance beer.
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.
