Michael Donaldson pens his last column for Drinksbiz and reflects on what’s changed in beer over the years...
This is my last dispatch for Drinksbiz after eight years popping up with various opinions on this, that and the other when it comes to beer – what’s good, what’s on-trend, what’s interesting or new.
Curiously, my debut here pretty much coincided with the rise and rise of hazies – a beer style that, overall, has been a blessing for the industry.
In my 16 years writing about beer, the advent of hazies was one of the most significant developments I witnessed.
I’m generalising a little here, but before hazies came along, craft beer was besotted with IPA and the evolution of that style towards increasing bitterness.
It had got to a point where IPA had nowhere else to go. We’d tried all the colour variations (Red, Brown, Black, White) and the cultural variations (English, American West Coast, Belgian, New Zealand), and the bittering wars had reached a détente with punters’ palates.
And then out of nowhere came hazies, with their counterpoint to everything we’d been trending towards with IPA.
“The hill I will die on in these final paragraphs is that the non-alcoholic beer available in New Zealand right now is sensational and will only continue to improve and grow.”
First, they were cloudy, hazy, unfiltered (or whatever term you want to use), so they immediately looked different to the clear beer we’d been raised on.
Photogenic, they had a ready home on Instagram just as that social media app was really accelerating.
They favoured sweetness over bitterness, making themselves more appealing to a wider range of customers, and they delivered the kind of flavours people love: sweet citrus, tropical fruit juice, peaches and cream.
This style pushed craft beer out of a stalled niche into a wider audience – when the mainstream craft brands (Mac’s, Monteith’s and Boundary Road) started pushing hazies it was obvious the industry had not just turned a corner but was in a whole new neighbourhood.
The proliferation of hazies also impacted other styles of beer. I don’t think smoothie sours or dessert sours would have found the same audience if hazies hadn’t paved the way in terms of look, texture and fruit-accented flavour.
What we also saw in response to hazies was an evolution in traditional IPA.
As a rule, these became slightly sweeter, the flavours moved away from woody and herbal notes and started mimicking the tropical fruit accents of the haze brigade, and the whole range of hoppy beers morphed away from being defined by bitterness.
The question being asked eight years ago, when I started writing here, was: “Have we reached peak craft?” The answer back then was: “Maybe, probably”.
But the advent of hazies kicked the can down the road, driving growth through the pandemic years. Now the question is not whether we’ve reached peak craft, or even peak beer, but rather whether we’ve reached peak alcohol?
All the data supports the idea that alcohol consumption, in all its forms, is on a sustained downward trend. It’s hard to separate this slide out from a general economic malaise – if we’re all suddenly better off financially, will we start buying more booze? I don’t know the answer to that.
But I do sincerely believe that beer, which has been around for hundreds (and more like thousands) of years, won’t be disappearing any time soon. It will continue to change. And the biggest change we’ve seen since the advent of hazies is the rise of non-alcoholic beer.
The hill I will die on in these final paragraphs is that the non-alcoholic beer available in New Zealand right now is sensational and will only continue to improve and grow.
If you’d told me eight years ago that I’d write that line, or that I’d be drinking non-alcoholic beer on a weekly basis, I’d have choked on my IPA. There are plenty of mockers and doubters out there when it comes to non-alcoholic beer, but it was the same in the early days of hazies and we all know how that turned out.
Cheers and thanks for reading.
Michael Donaldson is a Beer Writer of the Year, journalist and author
