The story so far...
The Chicago Tribune recently published a piece on The 25 Most Important American Craft Beers Ever. This inspired Michael Lally to wonder what an equivalent British list would look like, which in turn prompted Boak and Bailey to pick out a few beers that they'd expect to see on such a list. And thinking that this looked like fun, I thought I'd have a stab myself.
I don't really know much about pre-Thornbridge innovations in pale-and-hoppy, let alone the earlier waves of microbrewing, so apart from a tentative proposal that Hophead was significant, I'm going to stick to the last ten years or so. To keep it simple, I've also ignored influential beers from outside what is normally considered to be the "craft scene" - the surviving barleywines and Imperial Stouts from traditional family brewers, for instance. But then, I'm well under 25 beers here, so someone else can fill in those bits.
The major development of this era was large numbers of British brewers starting to be directly influenced by their American counterparts, so genuinely influential British beers become harder to spot. A lot of "milestone" beers were just the first British instances of styles that many people were already well aware of, so they arguably didn't blown minds in the same way that earlier innovations might have done.
With that out of the way, here are seven suggestions.
Thornbridge - Jaipur (2005)
There's really not much to say here that hasn't already been said!
Marble - Lagonda (2005)
The West-of-the-Pennines counterweight to Jaipur. I haven't really drunk much of it, but this was presumably fairly important in the establishment of Manchester as a craft hub?
Brewdog - Tactical Nuclear Penguin (2009)
Punk may be the big seller, but TNP was the big, silly, headline grabbing beer that really let the world in general know how far apart Brewdog stood from traditional real ale culture.
The Kernel - various pales and IPAs (early 2010)
Pretty much the prototype for the London Murky style of IPA, which feels like an important and (at the time) distinctively British innovation. The Kernel were also significant for being one of the first brewers to feel like they were primarily aimed at craft beer geeks rather than going for a wider audience - something which in turn signals the fact that there were suddenly enough craft beer geeks for that to be a viable business plan.
The Kernel - Export Stout London 1890 (2010)
How many qualifications need sticking on the sentence "the first example of a revived historic recipe" is a free blog post idea if anyone wants it, but London 1890 certainly feels significant in terms of popular interest in the idea.
Burning Sky - Saison a la Provision (2013)
This feels like another new current emerging - the arrival of a major brewery that makes a feature of slow aging and seasonal ingredients and situates itself at arms length from the urban modernism that characterizes a lot of the scene. Their flagship oak-aged bretted saison seems to embody that particularly well.
Cloudwater - DIPA series (2015 onwards)
Finally, it seems daft to make claims of influence for a series of beers that have only been around for a couple of years, but the buzz around Cloudwater's Double IPA series means that they can't help feeling like a landmark in terms of collective self-confidence.
So that's my list. But as has been pointed out elsewhere, without fairly extensive research these things will be strongly dependent on one's personal perspective, so I'd welcome any alternative suggestions in the comments below.
