Predictions: cynical and naive

I guess it's a bit late for a New Year crystal-ball-gazing post, but I've come up with a nice format so I'm going to use it. To whit: two jaded, cynical predictions about how nice things that everyone's looking forward to probably won't happen, and two naively credulous ones about different nice things that I'm hoping will.

Cynicism

Craft lager won't be massive. At least not in the way that some people seem to hope. As much as people like to go on about the wonders of a crisp, balanced Bavarian Helles, for the majority of drinkers, the added value of microbrewed lager over decent-ish import or domestic stuff isn't enough for them to be willing to pay a super-premium craft price on a regular basis. What we might see more of is traditional regional brewers and multinationals knocking out large quantities of poor-to-middling quality pilsners and calling them "craft lagers", because you can write craft on anything these days. The margins here are a lot bigger.

Farmhouse style sours - spontaneously fermented, barrel aged and blended - will be a tough sell, too. It's price, again, and consistency. An aged and blended sour like a gueuze is fundamentally quite expensive to produce. The consequently high prices are pretty offputting to British punters even when the producer has decades of history and makes reliably fantastic beer; for newer brewers who are basically learning on the job and trying to build a rep, it's going to be a very hard sell indeed. I'd expect to see a lot of "farmhouse brewers" leaning heavily on traditional pale ales to cover the rent.

Optimism

On the optimistic side, I think we're going to see more Belgian-influenced session beers - things like Wylam's DH Table Beer, De La Senne's Taras Boulba, Lost and Grounded's Hop Hand Fallacy. We're talking light, fresh, fun beers with a balance of hops, yeast and malt character, and maybe some subtle spicing. This sort of beer is distinctive but drinkable and fun to brew, allowing the brewer to exercise both delicacy and creativity. They're also relatively economical to produce, and interesting enough for the geeks but not too extreme for the wider market, so provided someone can think of a way of labelling them as a variety of IPA, we could really be in business.

Secondly, I'm hoping that freshness will come to be more of a selling point in the land of Serious Craft. We're sort of seeing this already with the cult of just-off-the-canning-line NEIPA, but as the UK craft landscape gets increasingly competitive and everyone and his dog has twenty lines of trendy beers from exciting local craft brewers, would it be too much to hope that those that can will also start to sell on freshness? I don't think we're far from the point where a bar that guarantees that hoppy beers were all kegged in the last two months and have been kept in coldstore throughout distribution and cellaring is more of a draw than the one that has ten extra lines of stuff that might have been sat in a warm warehouse for six months. This would be a rather good thing for those of us that don't want to spend top dollar on a fancy IPA unless we're pretty sure that it'll taste of hops rather than wet grass.