Can I Interest You in a Regular Beer? | October

beerstories

Aug 22

For October, I tackled a little notion that’s been sitting heavy in my grey matter these days: There’s nothing simple about today’s beer market. Welcome to the world of regular beer.

My most prized brewing possession is a rather crumpled aluminum can, white and a wee bit rusty, bearing but one word: BEER, in a bold typeface big enough to read at 20 paces. Size matters, as I often affix the can to a metal pole and lead beer tours around New York City, a Pied Piper toting people to the IPA promised land.

When folks first see the can, a jokey prop long ago gifted to me by a friend, many laugh and snap a pic for their Instagram feed, the can’s generic looks a guaranteed like. What’s not to love? It’s just beer, plain and simple.

There’s nothing simple about today’s beer market. As breweries have spread across America like peanut butter and jelly, they’ve jammed beer aisles with a bewildering assortment of beers boasting every imaginable ingredient and yeast strain, hops lavished like rose petals at a royal wedding.

Excess is everywhere you look, and drink. Omnipollo’s Fatamorgana double IPA boasts that it’s “quadruple dry hopped,” while Bruery Terreux makes the Bruesicle line of popsicle-inspired sour beers starring the likes of mangos and marshmallows that, don’t fret, are vegan. Sweets-inspired pastry stouts are oozing everywhere, like an uncontrollable slick of sticky chocolate syrup, evoking peanut butter cups, s’mores, tiramisu, candy bars and even breakfast.

Good morning! Might I interest you in Appalachian Mountain Brewery’s C.R.E.A.M., a donut-infused cappuccino milk stout? Or maybe you’d like the Answer’s Cinnamon Toast Crunch, an imperial stout starring the kid’s cereal?

The flavorful onslaught is compounded by a cacophony of colorfully helter-skelter labels, an all-you-can-look visual buffet that can overwhelm to the point of paralysis. This can send customers skittering into the comforting embrace of rosé or hard seltzer, claws out and welcoming one and all.

When everything is outlandish, when rebellious beers become the rule and not the exception, how is it possible to stand out? The answer, increasingly, is for breweries to stop being so wild and start embracing their mild side. To cut through the double dry-hopped clutter, breweries have begun embracing my gag can’s straightforward approach. They’re releasing mass-appeal lagers with humdrum names and often humble branding, harking back to the simpler days when beer was just beer—a one-size-inebriates-all lager sold good and cold.

Down in Blanco, Texas, Real Ale Brewing recently released Firemans Light, an easy-glugging 110-calorie lager aimed fit for “a light beer drinker looking for a quality beer or a craft beer drinker looking for a light option,” said Real Ale president Brad Farbstein. “Our lofty goal was to create this beer specifically for everyone.”

Against the Grain, in Louisville, Kentucky, is known for aggressively flavored and named beers like Citra Ass Down, a double IPA, and the Brown Note, a brown ale boasting a risqué label starring stained underwear. In May, the brewery released the plainly named A Beer, a “super premium American lager” fishing for a wider audience. “This is a beer for the people, by the people, to enjoy with the people you want to hang out with,” said cofounder Sam Cruz.

DuClaw Brewing, in Baltimore, Maryland, rides brewing’s trendy road in a car loaded with souped-up hazy IPAs, dessert-style stouts and novelties such as Sour Me Unicorn Farts, gone shimmery with glitter. But customer after customer kept asking a simple question: Did the brewery sell any regular beer?

In response, DuClaw released Regular Beer, an American lager with a little extra flavor oomph. “We wanted to make something light that goes down easy, but that still has enough flavor to separate us from domestic lagers,” said DuClaw brewer Mark Johnson.

Regular Beer is sold in 12-ounce cans with a white label, bearing the beer’s name and this slogan: “a beer that tastes like beer.” The tagline serves a reassurance to potential customers turned off by too much flavor, burned by a bad batch or two, or just simply overwhelmed by an overwhelming marketplace.

“Right now, walking into a liquor store, the choices are infinite,” said DuClaw’s head designer Tyler McCoy. “The vast array of designs and colors on the shelves can be overwhelming. We wanted to create something bold, utilitarian and in your face—something you know is beer.”

Something you know is beer. Some four decades ago, America’s modern beer movement arose in response to a lack of choice and flavor. Would you like this lager? Or maybe you’d like this lager with slightly fewer calories? Buy a case! Or two! Just in case friends come over and would very much like the same beer that you like. Branding became king, and brand loyalty was most definitely a thing.

America’s decades-long surge of breweries made many beer consumers as curious as a cat—and just a loyal. They now flit from brand to brand, beer to beer, style to style, rarely resting to stay awhile. Today’s innovations are yesterday’s old news, an IPA’s lifespan now measured in days and not months. So breweries roll out an endless procession of beers, hoping they’ll march into drinkers’ mouths, Untappd accounts and Instagram feeds, the appetite for the new and the next never, ever sated.

I’m intimate with being besieged by beer. I’ve been chronicling America’s fermented revolution for more than 15 years, dating back to those days folks got really excited about seasonal beer. A new beer every three months? How amazing! Now, fresh beers arise every day, every minute, and there’s only so much liver, taste buds and brain to process them all.

I was recently in Delaware on a beach vacation with my family, both swell reasons to drink beer. At a liquor store in Bethany Beach, I faced a fridge full of unfamiliar breweries and all-too-familiar styles: hazy IPAs clouding my field of vision. With some 7,500 breweries in America, I don’t possess a full mental Rolodex of each beer maker, much less their strengths and weaknesses. Should I get this one with the juice pun? Or that one with the hop pun?

A decade ago I would’ve bought both, embracing beers extending the extremes of good taste. But it’s tough to live life with the volume continuously cranked to eleven, dousing everything with flame-throwing hot sauce, ordering seven-scoop ice cream sundaes, adding a third patty to a cheeseburger. When excess becomes the everyday, what’s the point in putting another cherry on top? So the pendulum swings back, and embracing restraint and simple lagers, simply named, is so basic that it’s basically cool. It’s the circle of life, as told by the beer aisle.

In the end, I purchased the plainly named 2SPils, an unfiltered pilsner from Pennsylvania’s 2SP Brewing, priced around $10 a six-pack. The pilsner was simply refreshing, compelling without compelling me to think deep thoughts while I drank a couple cans surfside, the waves building and crashing on an infinite loop.