It used to be breweries would bet everything on a single flagship beer. You said you wanted a Sam Adams, and you meant a Boston Lager. Order a Sierra Nevada, and you expected their Pale Ale. Some people still think Anchor Brewing is actually called “Anchor Steam.”
But the days when brewers would hang their hat on a single offering are over.
The beer geek appetite for novelty and rarity has given way to a limited-release culture that eschews a core lineup of beers, let alone a single flagship. That’s why Other Half released, by my count, 155 different beers last year. And why Washington D.C.’s Bluejacket has produced a remarkable 225 beers in the few years of their existence. Or, why the hot, upstart British brewery, Cloudwater, doesn’t have a single year-round offering.
The flagships of yore—the Stone IPAs, Bell’s Two Hearted Ales and Brooklyn Lagers—can be now be found at most well-stocked supermarkets, ballpark concession stands, Irish pubs or even at the airport. This has become cause for dismissal for most beer geeks. But I still wanted to know, how do these beers stack up years—or even decades—after their respective heydays? Can Dogfish Head 60 Minute still matter, or simply taste good, amid a new paradigm of IPA?
Unlike previous tastings, which generally involved a month of prep, countless emails, phone calls and, more often than not, “knowing a guy,” this tasting’s logistics entailed going to a supermarket the morning-of. But that’s kind of the point; these are the beers that literally anyone can buy, whenever they want, so much so that we take them for granted.
For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Managing Editor, Bianca Prum; Senior Editor, Lizzie Munro; and Ethan Fixell, a fellow beer writer and beverage educator. We tasted 23 flagship beers blind, from red ales and amber lagers to pale ales and IPAs. Some proved to weather the test of time, while others felt like relics—a taste of history, better left to it.
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