A Plea to Breweries: Describe Your Damn Beers

Let’s get one thing straight, right away: The American craft beer industry of 2024 is more of a service industry than it’s ever been before, at any point in the U.S. craft beer story.

The roiling, unsteady economic seas upon which so many breweries have been bailing and foundering in the last two years have led to an ongoing cascade of closures, which has finally dampened what for so long seemed like a rate of new business openings that refused to reflect what was happening all around us. Now, we’re finally all on the same page in acknowledging it: Craft beer is in the dumps. What little growth has been available, can typically be found in the margins of the on-premise, in popular brewery taprooms catering to full-service experiences.

Gone are the days of opening a new brewery with a bottling or canning line, aiming to be a major regional brand within the first five years. That grocery/package store shelf space has become unobtainable, both because it’s ever shrinking thanks to a wide array of malternative beverages, zero-ABV offerings and canned cocktails, but also because it’s jealously guarded by the entrenched regional brewers (and Big Beer-owned companies) that are desperately fighting to retain what clout they have. These days, if you want to sell beer, your plan had better be to sell a whole lot of it out of your own taprooms, a reality that has also sadly led to the decline of the classic beer bar. Regardless, robust on-premise beer sales and a steady stream of new releases are the bare minimum at this point.

And there, we run into another problem, one that I suspect we’ve probably all frequently experienced in recent years. And that problem is simple: Many breweries don’t do a good job of describing their own beers, and letting the on-premise customer know what the hell they’re ordering. And the result is dissatisfied drinkers, asking why they just spent $7-10 on a glass of something they don’t particularly want.

The Expectation of a “Beer List”

I think it’s fair to say that if you visited any given craft brewery website a decade ago, you would universally have expected to find one piece of information more important than any other: A full list of the beers that brewery produced, complete with descriptions.

To be sure, this was once a much simpler concept to execute. The 2000s and earlier 2010s were an era of more static craft brewery lineups, which meant greater investment by breweries into presentation and marketing of each one. Companies all had flagships and “core beers” that stayed on year round, supported by carefully planned (but largely immutable) seasonals or special releases. New beer concepts arrived perhaps a handful of times per year, each with marketing, descriptions, etc., that had clearly been worked out well in advance. You could expect to visit a brewery website and effectively learn about all the brands that company produced, including history, tasting notes, production details and more. In doing so, you could easily grasp the overall brewing philosophy.

The steady rise of on-premise beer consumption in taprooms, however, coupled with the runaway popularity of hazy IPA and other styles in the back half of the 2010s, worked to radically change the structure of a typical brewery product lineup. Novelty became paramount, even when those “new” releases were more like palette-swapped versions of the same beers, over and over again. Flagship brands felt the pinch, as customers who were focused on ticking “new” beers on apps like Untappd left them behind in favor of whatever was fresh and hyped. A new beer release every weekend, or multiple new beers every week, became the expectation for many of the most popular breweries. And as that happened, taproom menus were increasingly filled with limited release beers that had never been made before, and might never be made again.

Considering that, is it any wonder that more breweries began to give up on the idea of writing decent descriptions of new beers on their websites? For one, how do you even attempt to make those beers sound distinct, when it’s the two dozenth new hazy IPA you’ve released in the last six months? For some companies, the incentive to have any up-to-date listing of beers on the website melted away as it became clear many drinkers didn’t care, or it was a job that seemed too daunting to dedicate the time and resources that it would require. And even those that continued to add every new beer soon ran into the issue of their websites becoming unwieldy and hard to navigate. Who wants to look through 100 IPAs in a backlog of brewing history, searching for the right one? All of these things have contributed to the decreasing prevalence of what we once would have just called “the beer list” you’d find on any brewery website. It affects both older and younger brewers: In my home city, there’s an excellent brewery turning 9 this year that doesn’t list a single beer they make on their website.

This is already a problem in and of itself, because it means someone wondering “What’s on tap at ____ brewery right now?” has a more difficult time finding the necessary information before they decide to visit. It also means that the burden of describing new beers falls to another venue, which is the taproom itself.

A Lack of Information in Taprooms

There are few things more frustrating in the modern beer scene than entering a gleaming, polished craft brewery taproom that seems to boast every convenience, bustling with drinkers, only to look up at an electronic menu that offers one or two words to communicate what kind of beer you’re thinking of ordering. Ah, I see 10 listings that are variations on “hazy IPA” … I wonder how any of those might be differentiated from each other? Ah, there’s one labeled as “imperial stout,” but is it also loaded with adjuncts and other flavorings? What of that one offering just labeled as “lager”? Is it hop forward? Malty? Can I deduce anything from its punny name? Is this going to be a total crapshoot?

In some cases, one may be able to get away with engaging the bartender or beer server with some basic questions, sussing out which of the IPAs is most up your alley, or just how sweet any of the adjunct-laden stouts are supposed to be. But what about when there are 20 more impatient taproom patrons queued behind you? What about when the beer server is clearly in the midst of their first day on the job, and they seem to have little to no conception of what they’re pouring? And even if that person does have a moment to talk, is individually describing each beer on the list to you really the best use of their time?

The answer, of course, is no–in an ideal scenario, the consumer can go up to the bar already knowing exactly what they want, because they’ve already been informed about the choices available to them. But that information is rarely going to come from an electronic menu board, and printed beer lists with detailed descriptions are more uncommon than ever thanks to the pandemic and the already referenced rise of one-off beer releases. That leaves online menus as one of the only ways one can hopefully be informed before placing an order, but too many breweries are still electing to not make use of these tools, which naturally leads to confusion and misunderstandings, neither of which is desirable for a service industry business.

To be sure: There are certainly breweries out there doing everything right. Some of the best brewery taprooms I visit on a regular basis feature meticulously up-to-date online draft menus with detailed descriptions, giving you an informed conception of even how all the IPAs differ from each other. But this should be the standard for running an effective brewery taproom in 2024, not an above-and-beyond piece of customer service. Anything else is just unnecessarily allowing customers to order pours of beer they may very well not enjoy, simply because they didn’t have enough information.

Case in point: Not long ago, my wife was ordering at a large, well-funded and popular local brewery taproom. Looking at the electronic menu above the bar, she landed on a new beer labeled simply as “coffee stout.” She loves stout, and lightly adjuncted classic stouts such as coffee stouts, so she ordered one.

The reality? The beer was actually a stout with “vanilla, caramel flavoring and cardamom” in addition to the coffee, which was the only thing mentioned by the sole source of information available to the consumer. Is that a valid concept for a “Turkish coffee stout,” or whatever? Absolutely it is, but the customer needs to know they’re ordering a stout with that kind of theming when they place the order. You can’t just surprise someone with “caramel, vanilla, cardamom” when they think they’re ordering a relatively dry beer. What if that person doesn’t really care for pastry stout concepts? Are they supposed to grill the bartender whenever they see “coffee stout,” to ask if there are any other adjuncts involved? Just how many questions are we expecting these busy taproom employees to answer?

Those kinds of misunderstandings are easy to avoid, provided that breweries simply take the time and effort necessary to help the customer make informed choices. Besides the labor and web savvy involved in keeping a detailed, up-to-date draft list online, there’s really no other downside! Every bit of information your customers have in making a choice about what to order in your taproom is a good thing, particularly if a positive reaction to the resulting beer leads to them becoming a new taproom regular. A negative experience, meanwhile, can easily have the opposite effect.

Perhaps a decade or two ago, when many American craft breweries were focused on the opportunity to grow through packaging and distributing their beer, this kind of attention to detail wouldn’t have mattered as much. Back then, you could simply print a description on each label or can, and rely on that to explain your product to the curious customer just starting out on their beer journey. But at a time when craft beer culture is taproom culture, and a huge number of small American breweries are competing for the same shrinking segment of the market, breweries can’t afford to simply allow the consumer to fend for themselves, not when the most likely outcome is that consumer simply going to the next taproom a block away. If you’re not interested in describing your beer to potential drinkers, don’t be surprised when they’re not interested in drinking it.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident beer and liquor geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more drink writing.