Oo-er missus, look at that The host for this relaunch is Alan McLeod over at A Good Beer Blog, and as with any relaunch the scope is naturally neat and tidy, with a pretty little bow on it There are so many avenues this question could be taken, he says channeling his inner James Burke from the Connections series of many moons ago.
I could look at the big picture, though to be honest that picture is something of a grim one at the moment, with regular closings and well established breweries going to the wall in the face of economic headwinds.
With such a curate's egg at the macro scale, perhaps the continued existence of Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, Allagash, and the other national scale craft breweries is the best thing. However, I don't want to think about the macro, I want to ground my response in my day to day, so I am going to augment the question a little and make it:. With that framing, the question becomes infinitely easier to consider and to answer, especially when I take a look at my annual review of beer in and compare it to One year later though and that number jumps to 34 from 57 beers across the review posts, which is Now, admittedly in I went to Czechia and Germany, which could skew the numbers, so let's look at when nobody really went anywhere Well, that was 37 lagers from a possible 51, or I would like to think you are getting the point by now.
There was no Port City Downright Pilsner, there was nobody making authentic Czech style dark lagers, as far as I am aware there was a single brewery that even considered decoction mashing Even a few years later, when we bought our house in , readily available excellent lager was difficult, at a meetup in our house with Czech and Slovak friends, someone bought a six pack of Lagunitas' allegedly Czech pilsner to which an older gentleman who had fled Czechoslovakia back when it still existed!
Well made beer it might well be, taste like a Czech pilsner it did not - haven't had it in many years so no idea what it is like these days. Spring forward though to today, and just in the Charlottesville area I have several reliable breweries making excellent lagers, in particular I will highlight Selvedge, whose range of decocted and extensively lagered bottom fermented beers formed the vast majority of my drinking last year. While I make no secret of my preference for lagers made with traditional techniques, I am not daft enough to cut my nose off to spite my face.
