(Boston, MA) – Jim Koch of Boston Beer Co. penned a piece that went live today, another one responding to the same Beer Advocate thread that Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione did last week. Koch uses the same argument as Calagione…

Unless you’re a brewer you probably missed the “Beer Advocate” thread last week bashing several craft breweries for being over-rated. Seemed to me the criticism was really about popularity not quality. Today’s craft beer lovers are on a hunt to discover the next new thing and, as brewers, most of us are trying to create interesting new beers. That’s great – we all love making new beers – but that doesn’t mean that an established and successful beer is any less great because it’s been around for a while and has attracted a big following.

If you take a closer look at the thread, you will find that out of hundreds of replies, only a couple people brought up the argument that those breweries were getting too big. Rather, much more discussion centered around brewers failing to meet the expectation of quality for the price they were charging. Just do a search for “price” in that thread.

Despite the applause that arose after Sam “Calagiowned” the negative Beer Advocates and the likely applause that will arise from Koch’s statement today, they are actually a bit deceptive in reality. Per Wikipedia…

A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.[1] To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.[1][2]

That isn’t to say that the “paradox of popularity” doesn’t exist but we’re failing to acknowledge the giant elephant in the room: the beer drinker’s resistance to pricing of beer like pricing of wine.

Brewers want to achieve the same margins as winemakers on those high-end beers. They’re putting in just as much time and effort, right? The problem is that those experiments, for the most part, are being received only marginally better, if not worse at times, than core offerings from these breweries that are being sold at a much lower price point.

Brewers will continue to “innovate” with these new high-end offerings as more and more drinkers come into the fold, just now learning that beer can be appreciated like wine has been. Not to mention, the population of those lured by rarity is growing.

Don’t be surprised, however, to see savvy beer drinkers that have already gone through many (too many?) trials with new products go back to value and who knows…maybe old favorites.

“Overrated” can stem from many things. Popularity…and price…are just two of them. Let’s not forget that.