I love these colorful chalkboards behind the bar, full of drawings and stylistic letters but when you step back a bit, they look like a secret language that only craft geeks and hop heads can understand. Let’s be honest, you have the name, the style and the description. In some case you have the IBU and the ABV and maybe a Ratebeer score.
Let’s take an example: Mosaic Monster, 2xIPA, west coast DDH 80IBU 9%abv RB88%
Read: If you didn’t know mosaic is an aromatic hop variety with typical notes of peach, tropical. We called it monster because for real it’s very intense. It’s what we call a double india pale ale style. To get to that intensity we added mosaic hop 2 times during cold aging (double dry hopping). Bitterness is fairly high but classic for style and it’s big at nearly twice your regular lager’s alcohol level. By the way it’s rated 88% on the social beer rating platform called Rate beer.
It gets lengthy I agree but the with the first one we talk to ourselves or to our fans. No way we’ll get a wine drinker on our side or move the light lager drinker to anything more adventurous.
Also, at this stage we don’t even know the color of the beer!
Think about a menu of 25 beers with these descriptions? I suppose there are much simpler way to talk to people.
Like A strong Exotic Hop aroma from Seattle with a golden color and a bold bitterness… ? Simpler ?
It’s like IBU and EBC on labels… they don’t help people because most of them don’t have a reference in mind. Many people can’t even say what’s the ABV of a mainstream lager! I think pictograms by far and large tells more to people. 5 hop cones… very bitter, 1 sugar cube…low sweetness.
As high end beer gets more expensive (I’ve new England IPA at 4 cans 22$ this WE ), consumer will want value for money. How frustrating is it to buy a four pack and realize it’s not at all what you expected?
In bars you can always try a sampler and I like that a lot. Bartender tend to also be a great advise but in retail you only have the packaging to convey the work or an app on your phone?
More work to be done!
