Let's be honest - most craft beer is crap
 

I've drunk hundreds of different craft beers and the reality is the vast majority of them are rubbish.
Craft beer grew out of a desire to counter the bland dullness of mass produced swill but in many respect it has become guilty of the same sin.
I see 20 taps on a bar and I know a lot of them will be the same IPA hop bombs with high abvs that all taste of the same thing - hops.
Hops should complement a beer not dominate it so powerfully that my sinuses explode and my eyes water.
The rest will be the result of some microbreweries having a willy waving competition to see who can produce the foulest tasting combination - yes,smoked porter with strawberry poppadums that's you I'm talking about.
What started in the US transferred to the UK about ten years ago and exactly the same modus operandi occurred.Most of what I taste is undrinkable to such an extent that now I do something I've never ever done before and that's order a half pint.
Okay,I hear you say,what do you like ?
Bass is what I say.
Increasingly hard to find these days but a truly great beer - which even the Americans don't manage to cock up when they brew it.
As you were.

Great post.
I don't understand the hops obsession, but to each their own I guess.
Same with the weird flavor combinations.

Bass is a good choice. I also like the Munich beers. (Reinheitsgebot is a good thing).

So you don't like hops (or at least large quantities of them). It would appear that the bulk of the craft beer market disagrees with you because solidly crafted, highly hopped IPAs are what sell. You don't have to like them, just seek out the other styles (which are out there). It may take a bit of work but there are plenty of amazing beer in classic style being brewed all over the world. Some good recent UK examples include the Cloudwater Dark Lager, Brewdog Jet Black Heart and Kingpin, The Kernel Table Beer........

I'm not a fan of most hoppy beers, but I have no trouble finding other great craft beers that are more to my liking. What styles do you prefer?

Don't get me wrong.
I do like some hoppy craft beers but not the ones that hit you across the forehead with a baseball bat.
I supped half a gallon today of a wonderful craft beer with a grapefruity/melonish tang and only about 5.4% on the Richter scale.
But on a week-long road trip around the Florida Panhandle earlier this year I drank nothing but the same-old-same,old hoppy IPAs with snazzy names and funky beer fonts.
But basically I was paying a premium for some microbrewery to produce exactly the same bland IPA hop-bomb as the next microbrewery 50 miles down the road.
In the end I just drank Yeungling.
Tasty and reliable.

Yes!^

The malt also make them almost sickly sweet. I'm totally done with craft beer. The hipsters (hopsters??) are firmly in charge and sit there discussing tasting notes on beers that are barely indistinguishable from each other. Craft beer is a misnomer. Mass produced beer may be bland, but there is a reason people drink it.

the problem is marketing, and thats what many things are becoming these days
and its the consumers (who join the cults, regardless of quality) who encourage it

but that does not mean that NONE are great for certain styles, or in general, etc

Decent post! We will reach peak hops soon! The market obsession with "craft", "small batch" and hops has got very far out of hand, and there will reach a time where there is a market correction.

It is excellent that there is so much interest in the beer industry and producing an array of different beers, however at the moment more hops is almost synonymous with better in many circles, including people who I know.

I happen to be one of the hop lovers, one of my favourite styles is an American style IPA out of a keg, but I can appreciate the vast array of other style out there, and do enjoy other beers that aren't hopped to hell, like a decent wheatbeer like Weienstephaner.

I like the creativity of the brands and the brews out there, you know funny or interesting names, good logos or brewers ethos, however there is also a snobbery problem among some of the drinkers. Some people just want to have a beer, a standard cold fizzy lager, or a standard smooth bitter which was just as good 10 years ago as it is today. However some of the craft heads can't help but ridicule these choices!

Actually one issue I have when there is so much choice is remembering which ones I like! So now I have the Untappd app so I can keep track!

EDIT: Oh yeah and now "craft" is as mainstream as it is, with the likes of AB InBev purchasing Camden Town Brewery (craft beer brewery), people will get bored with the novelty and move onto being interested in something else. Hey maybe I should start bottling some craft wine with some rare grapes grown at an irrelevant high altitude. BRB I'm going to get some investors.

Totally agree that a lot of it is overhopped dross.

Was disappointed also that on my trip back to the UK last week a lot of the trendier drinks appear to be forcing out some of the better mid-sized brewers from bar space. My local (10 miles from their brewery in Lewes) no longer has Harvey's on draught, also struggled to find a pint of Fuller's Summer Ale in London, plenty of micro brew stuff and (bizarrely) loads of Sierra Nevada but not the local seasonal specialty.

I've taken to asking for a sample before I commit. Very few places have an issue with this, and those that do have subsequently turned out to be below par joints anyway.

At risk of changing the subject, I was also irritated by how hard it was to find decent cider. "What flavour" was the question I kept getting. Surely no-one in history has ever thought that cider would be improved by the addition of passionfruit. I bought a Kiwi and Lime one for curiosities sake and it was vile, don't think we even got close to turning it back into water between 5 of us.

From what I've read, small breweries like to make IPAs because they're hard to really screw up, since the strong hops flavor can cover up a lot of mistakes, compared with, say, a Kolsch or a bock. So you end up with a lot of mediocre IPAs.

But I think there's a big difference between "most craft beer is crap" and "most craft IPA is crap". I do enjoy a good IPA once in a while, when the mood strikes, but most of the time, I lean towards balanced reds, toasty browns, porters, stouts, and Belgians, and the fall seasonals. For me, the explosion of craft breweries has been a godsend, with so many more choices available than 15 years ago, when I felt were lucky if the bar devoted one of it's half dozen taps to Sam Adams.

I used to be one of those people who thought all IPAs were hop bombs that were just too bitter to be palatable. Then I discovered that those IPAs are the crap beers. There are some truly delightful IPAs in which the hops accentuate the rest of the brew.

The craft beer scene here in Maine is really amazing. If you ever see anything by Maine Beer Company (particularly their Lunch IPA - my all time favorite beer), grab it. Ditto for much of what Rising Tide Brewing makes.

Mass-produced beers are awful and nobody should have reason to consume them. See how I can just toss out unwarranted and unsupported opinions as facts too? It's easy.

:D You should do this regularly everywhere you go on FT. It makes you a lot of friends and you will be in demand at all the do's.

What's an example of a crap IPA here in the UK? Not a discriminating beer drinker so would like to know what is considered bad

Anything by Brewdog is very hit and miss.
A triumph of PR and marketing over substance.