Lamentationes Desperatorum

I was wandering around the supermarket where I do the weekly shop recently, and as is my wont I bimbled over to the beer section to have a browse. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be buying anything, my beer fridges being pretty full of excellent lager after all, but it is a habit at the end of the shop to just take a peek. Now, while owning the fact that I do my weekly shop in a supermarket, and that I understand they have to offer what is more likely to sell, it was still a dispiriting experience.

Unless you have read a vanishing small number of my posts on here, or any other social media platforms, you will know that I am a very irregular drinker of the old India Pale Ale - side thought, it seems almost jarringly quaint to see it spelt out in full rather than just acronymed down to IPA. Yes, I am predominantly a lager drinker, especially of beers I am buying in the shop or at the pub/taproom. Most of the top fermented beers I drink are my own homebrew, stuff like bitter, mild, stout, and my lime infused witbier, which is currently on tap.

Of course, being a lager drinker gives me plenty of scope for diversity of style, and I love mixing things up with pilsners, Vienna lager, a dunkel or six, the occasional rauch doppelbock, you get the picture. Anyway, coming back to my wander around the beer aisles and their groaning under the weight of many a bottle and can of IPA with cartoonish labeling, it suddenly hit me that there are many beers I have enjoyed which seem no longer to be available, not just in my local store - there are some things that I pop into the northern Virginia branch when I have the chance specifically to buy - but as in gone, and invariably replaced by an IPA of some level of bastardisation.

As I bimbled those short aisles, and not counting here the import section, I noted a single brown ale, the excellent Tavern Brown from Alewerks Brewing in Williamsburg, just the one amber ale, Satan's Pony from Charlottesville's South Street Brewery, and precisely zero milds, hefeweizens, Scottish ales, Czech style dark lagers, and even an utter dearth of Extra Special Bitter - I have given up hope of ever finding a worthy bitter, ordinary or best, on the shelves of the supermarket. Thank goodness for Selvedge, who produce excellent examples of both, and have them on cask, from time to time, as well as my own best bitter than I brew at least 4 times a year.

It seems actually vaguely ironic then that at the recent Beer World Cup, there were 112 categories - and don't get me started on the iconic Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the very archetype and poster child of the American Pale Ale being submitted as an ESB and winning gold. At last year's Great American Beer Festival there were 102 categories, and yet an alien visiting a supermarket in central Virginia would be forgiven for believing beer was called IPA, and that was pretty much all that was available. Yes, I appreciate that I am not talking about specialist craft retailers here, who tend to have a much better selection of beer in terms of stylistic variety. Even then, the prevalence of badly out of date beer, lagers stored at room temperature, and badly oxidised imports gives me pause when dropping full price money on a six pack of duff beer.

Maybe I am just entering my curmudgeonly dotage as I creep ever closer to my 50th birthday later this year, but I have found little joy of late browsing the aisles and shelves of the beer retailing world, whether supermarket or specialist. Of course there are beers, usually seasonally available lagers such as Tröeg's Little Nator, that I happily stock up on when they are available, but usually my little bimbles are more a ritual performed through a misplaced sense of duty, with a hint maybe of self-flagellating hope of something other than yet another "innovation" in the form of an IPA.