I used to be the worst kind of beer drinker. The one who thought he was right about everything but actually knew very little. I don’t feel regretful or embarrassed about this. Who wouldn’t have got caught up in the excitement propagated by the emergence of thousands of quirky, independent breweries across America? I needed something like that, honestly. Something that was my own and not that of my father.
American beer culture rapidly proliferated within the United Kingdom in the early 2010s, manifesting itself in the form of hundreds of copycat breweries attempting to channel the creativity being demonstrated by their American peers (with varying results.) I let it wash over me like a tidal wave. As my own fandom reached fever pitch, I did the most obnoxious thing possible: I started a beer blog.
One of the earliest mistakes I made as I began my endeavour to catalog British beer culture was to judge breweries by how visible they were, and how fast they were growing. If they were able to present themselves as slick and professional, just like the breweries I experienced when visiting the USA, those were the breweries I wanted to be associated with. Two stood out in particular: Beavertown and Camden Town. A former North Londoner, I lived locally to both, and I loved their beers and their respective taprooms (ok Beavertown not so much, on reflection that space was pretty rustic.) If you have the energy to traipse back through this blog you will see plenty of evidence of how enamoured with them I was. Honestly? I remember the beers as being exceptional, if perhaps a little inconsistent. If you look at where some of the brewers went afterwards: Lost and Grounded, Newbarns, Garage, Stigbergets etc, then this makes complete sense.
In the end, however, both breweries sold me and my enthusiasm for them down the river. Camden was acquired in full by the world’s largest brewer, Anheuser Busch InBev, in 2015, and then Beavertown began selling itself, piece by piece, to the second largest, Heineken, in the summer of 2018. It made both of its founders millionaires—but, spoiler—it turns out, generationally at least, they already were. Funny, when you think about it. To me at least. But it also makes total sense too. From the off they had the means to present themselves in a way that a lot of startups didn’t, and this is why they were so successful during their heyday.
By the point of Beavertown’s segue into corporate mundanity I found myself in a different situation. No longer an amateur enthusiast, I was now a full-time professional reliant on the beer industry to make my living. In fact, when Beavertown sold the first portion of its business I had contractual obligations to host talks at the second edition of its Extravaganza beer festival. What should have been a weekend of deliciousness and celebration is actually the source of some of the most awkward memories I possess, for a multitude of really shitty reasons.
After that moment I started to look at beer and breweries differently. I consider the weekend of that festival in September 2018 to be the end point of the modern British beer boom. Both Camden and Beavertown had now been sucked into the inevitable, bland tediousness demanded by their paymasters, their beer eventually becoming as inspiring as a two by four to the face. But I actually consider this to be a good thing. It marked the beginning of beer becoming boring again, and I was here for it.
Perhaps further exacerbated by the pandemic, I found that my needs as a drinker and what I was enthusiastic about began to change completely. For starters, I no longer gave two fucks about the latest can releases and whatever batshit nonsense brewers decided to put in them. Taprooms, and breweries in general had lost their lustre. I wanted cosy, I wanted warm, I wanted welcoming, and I wanted my beer to be a reasonably sensible strength, in pint form.
The blinkers finally off, I actually began to enjoy the parts of beer culture that for a decade I had been attempting to escape from. I would visit a brewery to write a feature for work, and then in my spare time plot which pubs I would visit afterwards and dream about cellar cool, well conditioned pints of cask ale. When I did head back to the USA, I was no longer poring over tasting flights, but finding the places that did the best, most reliable beer service. Why would I pay $7 for an IPA in a taproom when it's happy hour at the dive bar down the street and the same beer is $4.50 (and they do great wings.)
Before the “craft beer revolution”—a term I have come to loathe—being really into beer made you a weirdo, an outsider. For a generation of millennial men like myself (and lets be honest with ourselves here, it was a fucking sausage party, and still is) we made the IPA our entire personality, and for a split second that was cool. Or at least it felt cool. Like we’d discovered the hottest album from a band you’d never heard of, and we were absolute arseholes in terms of how protective of it we were.
Now, though, many of us feel differently about beer. Yes the IPA/Haze Bro/Taproom culture still exists if you want it, that’s not going anywhere and I’m actually glad that as a scene beer is one that remains multifaceted. Diversity is a strength, not a weakness. But for most of us who got into beer 10 or 15 years ago our needs have changed. There is no chase, no hype, no fomo, just nice pints in charming places as and when we want them. Beer is boring again, and it’s brilliant.
This piece is a contribution to the January 2025 edition of The Session, a monthly beer blogging project founded in 2007 by Jay Brooks.