In Defence of the New

The craft beer scene's thirst for novelty can be one of its more ridiculous aspects. I sometimes wonder whether anyone would actually notice if there were only really a couple of dozen different New England DIPAs, being repeatedly repackaged with different combinations of collaborating breweries listed on different snazzy cans with different cryptic names. But this sort of endless variation seems to be what sells, at least at the more rarefied end of the market. The beer list at a premier league craft beer bar - or somewhere with aspirations to be one - is typically packed with one-offs, special editions, new breweries and collaborations, with maybe just a tap or two at the start reserved for established local favourites.

This neophile tendency is obvious in the craft beer scene, but it has its counterpart in the world of more traditional British beers, too. Real ale enthusiasts still often seek out the "beer range varies" freehouse with its endlessly rotating lineup of real ales, inevitably from "local microbreweries". A local pub to us, the Cambridge Blue, keeps tally of its "beers so far", presumably in the decade or so since the current landlord took over. Despite the fact that this is currently into the tens of thousands, for my money the best beer there is often Dark Star's Hophead, one of the few regular fixtures.

This sort of thing is easy to take the piss out of - I mean hell, I just did, twice. It's also commonly pointed at as a microcosm of what's wrong with the world - the anally-retentive list-ticking impulse, the image-obsessed millenial's need to be seen drinking the latest sought-after beer to get "numbers" on "the gram", or the power of marketing or a good hype machine to make quality irrelevant. But I think this is missing the point.

The fact is that if we're interested enough in beer to talk about it, to write about it and to seek out the best places to drink it then we've been through at least one phase in our drinking when we've seriously expanded our horizons. For myself, I know that at some point I went from drinking whatever alcopop, macro lager or spirit-and-mixer was current with my mates to realising that I actually quite liked the pongy stuff on the handpumps. And from drinking anything from a handpump to knowing that there was a whole world of real ales out there and that I definitely liked some more than others. I've got into Belgian beer and modern craft from a position of no knowledge, and had some amazing beers along the way, and to be honest I'm still quite excited by how many great German and Czech beers, even styles, I've still got to taste for the first time.

The desire to always be trying new beers is rooted, on some level, in the belief that we might still be in one of those phases, or at least in a lingering habit that we picked up while we were. It's about a belief that there are great new beers out there, from great new breweries, in great new styles, and that they could be better than anything we've tried - so much so that it's worth taking a chance on a new beer even over a beer that we know we like. And at some point this has genuinely been true for almost all of us, so while we might not all share that belief right now, at least not enough to tempt us away from Sussex Best, Orval or Kernel Pale, it seems rather mean-spirited to be so quick to just laugh at it or dismiss it as just hype-chasing.