Faking It
So the good folks at Miller-Coors brewing recently came out with a few new fake craft beers – Batch 19 and Third Shift. What I’m curious about is how I immediately knew that neither one was what you could actually call a craft beer, despite the rustic labels and so on. I guess I’m sort of a beer snob, but not the kind who hangs around Beer Advocate or whatever, keeping up on the latest trends. I didn’t know that either beer was brewed by Coors until I looked it up for this post, just that they had to be brewed by some massive brewery. But how, given that Coors does everything it can to avoid putting its name on labels or ads? Okay, I guess for Third Shift it was pretty clear just because of the massive advertising campaign – no craft brewery can afford all those TV ads. But I can’t recall ever seeing an ad for Batch 19, so how did I know?
Anyway, it isn’t really that bad, in my humble opinion. Which is kind of strange, given that the whole whoopty-doo about it is that it is supposed to be “pre-prohibition”, and it’s not like beer was necessarily all that great back then. I confess I’m having a hard time coming up with relating this to writing in any way, but I’m genuinely curious, and I’m wondering if someone can tell me what hidden power I used to discern this puzzle, and whether they can tell me how to harness it for something useful.
Consistency? Maybe each bottle is too much alike? Whereas a small brewery might be more variable?
I really have no idea. I don’t drink, but that’s my guess!
I’ve mulled it over, and I suspect it may simply be that the beer suddenly showed up in a whole bunch of stores at the same time, which isn’t something a craft brew would be able to pull off. The interesting thing is that I noticed that subconsciously. If only that intuition worked for non beer-related things.