Have you had a craft beer lately?

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its up the road from me..yes.

 

Craft beer is the only carbonated hard beverage I'll consume.

With the exception of White Claw

 

Is Heady Topper "craft"? That is my fanciest beer experience.

Hippies will pay $20 a can for this stuff. I don't know it's just beer to me. When I drink it's Rollin Rock, it's cheap and it's simple.

 

Life is too short to drink cheap beer!

 

as far as i know, great lakes brewing is the only craft brewery around here. normally if i'm drinking beer i'll have one or another of theirs, but i haven't been drinking much lately except with my cheap friends who stock their fridge with shit like natty ice.

i've been meaning to ask if that's where you are. i was there a couple weeks ago and it never occurred to me that it was your town until i saw that downtown waterfall that i'm pretty sure you posted pictures of at one point.

it was a really nice place. unfortunately i was only there for 2 1/2 days so i didn't get to see as much as i would have liked.

 

Oh cool!
What brought ya here, work? Or do you know someone here?
It is a really nice town, really pretty and charming
What did you do while you were here?

 

i have friends in travelers rest. we had a mini reunion of college friends.

the hosts have 3 kids under 5 years old, so that severely limited what we could do; we mostly just hung out at their house and caught up. we did hit the weekly local bluegrass festival, and then we went to downtown greenville to check out the scenery at one point. i had an unfortunately scheduled phone interview for a job that i did not even end up getting during that portion of the trip though, so i had to hang back and was only able to meet the others for the last 45 minutes of the greenville tour. so i literally had a bowl of some amazing mystery food that is not available anywhere around here (they got me a to-go bowl from wherever they ate, so i can't even tell you where it was from), and then walked across that bridge over the waterfall, and then it was time to pick up the kids from preschool. but that 45 minutes impressed me anyway.

 

The food here is definitely top notch, glad you got to try something even if it was to go

Travelers Rest is a really cute town too. If you ever visit your friends again you guys should bike the bike trail from Travelers Rest to Greenville. That trail is my favorite part about living here. You can rent bikes with those little trailers on the back for the kiddos to sit in. And to bring this back on topic, there's a couple of breweries along the way; we always stop in for a beer or two whenever we bike the trail

 

Last night I had a Pecan Porter from the Red Cap brewery in Cisco, TX. It was fantastic!

 

Above post should say Red Gap!

 

To me most of them are a rip off.
Up until this so called 'Craft Beer' fad a beer was a beer.
Particularly in the Real Ale from the barrel beers of which there were hundreds of brands anyway.
My favourite is a Hoppy Real Ale beer called 'Proper Job' and you won't find better.

Then along came a wheeze to call some ales Craft Beers, and charge much more for them.
For instance usually craft beers are sold in 330cl smaller bottles and cans, whereas usual beers are sold in 500cl bottles and cans.
And of course they charge even more than the 500cl bottle/can.
This is a Rip Off as generally speaking those beers are no different produced then the rest of Real Ales.

Except from the Lager types which are brewed/sterilised/homogenised/stuffed with co2 and then out to you!

I did find the below article about this subject most interesting though.

Craft Beer is a Rip off!
Wow, isn’t the price of Craft Beer a total Rip off?!
I mean $65-$70 and sometimes $80-$90 for a slab of 24 beers, when you can pay $40 for a 30-pack of something that’ll do the same job. What a total rip-off!

No wonder no-one buys all these fancy schmancy beers and all these little breweries can’t get their “ooo-la-la Hoppy, malty, wankity wank” boutique beers into the front bar taps of pubs and clubs!
If they weren’t all so bloody money hungry, hardened up, battled a bit and brought their prices down, then they might be able to spark some interest.
These “Craft Breweries“ charging us poor punters $70 for a box of their “hand crafted” beer, or $22 for a 6-pack of some “micro-brewed” blah blah are just money pigs!
Sure, it’s nice beer and all, but why should we pay so much, just so we can have a pint of tasty hoppy beer.
You don’t see that happening with Wine do you?, nooo, $12-$18 and you can get yourself a decent bottle of red sometimes.
I mean, if the Wineries can do it, then that’s how it should be for beer too! None of this charging us like a rabid, wild, double humped desert camel with a nest of angry ginger ants up shoved fair up its clacker just so we can have a beer after mowing the lawn or when mates come over, geeze! Why can’t they just charge the same as breweries like, Boags, or Tooheys, or Cascade or Hahn! Nup!, there are plenty of other breweries out there that don’t charge the earth for a carton of piss, why should the crafties have to charge so much?

You know what?, to some extent, I actually agree with the above…
What If I told you you’re getting royally “backdoored” with a fat man’s torn blundstone, laceup steel cap, that’s been walking across a freshly gravelled bitumen road on a 48c degree day for the beer flavoured drink that you just paid $30 a box for?

What if I told you that your nearest small brewery is already being raped by fat sweaty men, and as uncomfortable as that tar dripping, gravel filled steel cap boot is back up there in your turd cutter, the small breweries are actually being stretched out like a trying to push a house brick up into a goldfish’s bum by a whole bunch of obese sumo wrestlers wearing studded golf shoes, all trying to get a comfy spot in the breweries lower colon like a house cat on nanna’s couch.

(I have no idea how this shit pops into my head)

The truth is, you could be paying a shitload less for your favourite brewed bevvy of choice.
The truth is, up to 25% of what you payed for your favourite crafted amber have gone straight into the pockets of those fat arsed, Armani wearing, circle jerk champions in parliament.

You see, breweries pay two taxes. Firstly they pay GST, and then they pay an excise tax, this is essentially a tax on a tax.
This means that for any income they make, depending on the output of beer and %ABV, approximately 25% of it goes straight out to the chair sniffers in parliament.
This is on top of income tax, company tax, wages, bills, etc. TWENTY FIVE PERCENT! A quarter of everything they earn, gone to the Mr Shafty the tax man’s stubbly fingered hand.

To heat up the poker that’s already being jammed fair into the small breweries coighta, it has to be paid before anything else, every 7 days, Not once a month, not quarterly or annually EVERY 7 DAYS!

So here in Oz, you’re average small brewery makes 1000L of 5%ABV Beer, they pay about $1400 in tax, The alcohol content does make a difference in the excise tax, anything under about 3.8%ABV attracts a cheaper excise, this is the governments way of trying to promote lower consumption in alcohol for the punters like you and me. The contradiction in this is that for an equal amount of drinks; Beer Vs. Wine, Beer attracts about $15 tax while wine attracts about $3 tax. The wine industry has an excise rebate system that means the small winemaker can pay less tax while trying to get his winery off the ground.
Have a look around your local bottle shop at the plethora of wine you have to select from. Then compare that to craft beers, you’ll notice the differences.

Anyway, I don’t want to lose you in my ranting, so back to some metaphoric tangents:

It’s the Excise tax that keeps plummeting it’s dirty, hairy, and un-lubed fist into the mouth of small breweries and ripping out a quarter of the sustenance from their malnourished gullet that they need to survive on, this then leads to starvation and collapse.
Oh, and that’s not all. Just to throw a studded vice clamp onto their testicles, If a brewery sells its golden goodness in a container smaller than 50Litres (bottles, cans, smaller kegs), then they have to pay around an extra 50c per litre in tax.
How’s that for shafting?
There are other, more complexed intricacies to how they work out how much to adjust the excise to, but by now you should be getting the picture that Small Breweries are copping a flogging before they can even make it off the ground.

So, yeah, agreed; The Price of craft beer is a complete rip-off, but what you didn’t know is that the Government is getting your money from behind the brewery, the Brewery itself is getting sweet FA.
The Breweries out there are doing it tougher than a patient man with an awesome left hook just to make the beer and distribute it in 50L kegs.
Putting their beer in bottles to compete against the big 2 boys at the bottle shop brings on another bum pumping from the Government.

Wine, because it never had the stigma of being a “lower class” drink, and always had that association with the “upper class” attracted a rebate from the excise, this means that the 4 litre goon bag you just bought for the 16yo in the car park only attracted $3 tax.
The slab of monkey piss you bought yourself attracted somewhere around $12.

So, try to think of beer this way:
your Boags, or Tooheys, or Cascade or Hahn are all the equivalent of cask wine.
Mass produced by machines to the minimal required quality. Sent to you by corporate giants with huge bying power that can squash the smaller guys.

Your craft beer is made by a battling man, who’s more passionate about beer than money, who probably came from homebrewing beer so he loves brewing it, loves drinking it and wants to share it with us and help bring us back from the tragedy that ruined Australian beer: the six o’clock swill.

So why not buy craft beer?, you would rather pay more for a bottle of red than a cask wouldn’t you?

Oh and all these other “breweries” like Boags, or Tooheys, or Cascade or Hahn, all owned by one of 2 companies.

Read about it here: All your Beer are belong to us

Cheers,

Beer Fingers


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that sounds pretty great. i did see the bike trail, but i didn't know where it went or anything.

 

There's like 700 craft breweries in my area. I'm not much of a drinker anymore though so I rarely go.

 

I think craft beer is over rated. Ohh I'll put a lil bit of fancy fruit in this batch, we'll charge an extra 25 for that. Craft beer.

I'll tell you something. This afternoon I drank 5 bottles of lowenbrau, and I'm fucken wrecked. Craft beer is the biggest suckers trap out there on the market.

 

This is probably one of the single dumbest things I've ever read on this forum - and that says a lot.

 

I only read the read your first part but yeah fucken Ay!

Ohh I'll add a bit a fruit here, a fruity aroma. Charge an extra 25 for it.

Yeah well folks like me don't fall for that bull shit. I'll take my 17€ case lowenbrau thank you very much. Tastes about as good and gets the same job done, except my mouth don't taste like pomegranate.

 

i didn't even read boozer's post originally because it was way too long. but yeah, it's not even close to accurate based on what i've seen. maybe it's different in europe. but here, craft beer usually comes in the same size bottles as regular beer, and costs a little more but not the crazy price jumps listed there (such expensive beer does exist, but it's not the norm). and it's available on tap at most decent bars. the nice ones hardly have anything else available. and then the article goes on to say that wineries don't rip you off. fuck, i've seen $30 glasses of wine for sale at those places.

 

Yeah but.. You live in America where it's claimed that.. Budweiser.. is the King of beers.

 

^
What do you think about kirschenbier (kirschbier), Irmi? We once stopped at a german camping and it was the only beer they sold. Seemed like it was really common over there (so technically not craft as in from a small local brewery). I was not a fan. I don't like my beer fruity.