Ten years that changed beer

Now looking more analytically than romantically at the best-of lists from RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, it’s just a list of Imperial Stouts (and mostly barrel-aged ones), some Double IPAs, a few Belgian Quadrupels and, a bit further down, some Lambics. It’s a surprisingly narrow list of styles; I didn’t notice that back then. But how does that list compare to today.

Jump forward 10 years and we can take a retrospective look at what’s changed––the top rates, the most common styles, the new styles––but also in what capacity things have remained. What we can see is how 2013 was the cusp of change for craft beer, and the number of breweries has accelerated since then: we have doubled the number of British breweries since 2013, and in the US, their number has trebled.

Breweries like Cloudwater, Verdant, Northern Monk, Siren, Beavertown, Burning Sky, and many others were either just-opened or just about to open in 2013. Most small breweries still only put beer in casks and bottles, but within a few years it’d flip to kegs and cans. It was also around this time that IPAs brewed in New England, from names like Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, Trillium and Tree House found their tipping point of popularity, and found their way over to Europe. With things rapidly changing in the beer industry, it allowed a mentality shift beyond old traditions and towards innovation, and it led to a new era of brewing. 

Perhaps the clearest change is how hazy beer has become. The popular pale ales and IPAs, and even the beers still served on cask, got cloudier. With new hop varieties they got juicier. With more varied drinkers discovering beer, flavour profiles became broader to welcome in more diverse palates. And did that change the top-rated beers?

The short answer is: not really. The lists are still dominated by Imperial Stouts, but if we dig a little deeper, particularly when looking at Untappd, then we can see broader trends. Untappd has surpassed RateBeer and BeerAdvocate to become the most popular beer rating platform. The older sites built communities in their active online forums, and became a grand database of beer, while the newer Untappd (which was founded in 2010 and passed one million users in 2014) was a fast-paced app that essentially gamified beer, allowing you to check in what you were drinking, give a quick score, and collect badges. It arguably took beer rating to a broader audience of drinkers and it’s now the most relevant place to look for broader beer trends, but especially those at the top end, where 19 of the top 20 highest overall beers are all strong, rare and barrel-aged. The other is a Hazy Double IPA. High scores don’t necessarily mean the most popular beers in terms of what’s being drunk.

In 2022, the top three beer styles for the highest number of overall Untappd check-ins were: American IPA, New England IPA and Imperial IPA (the style distinction between an American and a New England IPA is hard to define as almost all of the world’s top 50 highest rated American IPAs are hazy in appearance). The rest of the top 10 reads like a list you’d see in most taprooms today, anywhere in the world: Fruited Sour, Double New England IPA, Pale Ale, Imperial Stout, Session IPA, Belgian Tripel and Pilsner (with Tripel perhaps the only outlier there from taprooms).

The same list from 2013 isn’t available, but some of those styles hadn’t been codified as they are today: New England IPAs were around but not yet the thing we know them as now; a fruit sour was basically a Kriek, not the heavily fruited sours we love; Session IPAs were only just appearing; and very few small brewers made Pilsner. But it’s the IPAs which are most significant, as one-third of Untappd’s 120 million check-ins in 2022 were some kind of IPA. And those IPAs have changed.

The IPAs of 2013 were so bright you could read that year’s best-of list through any of the beers. Sparkling and golden-amber in colour, they were simply American IPAs and didn’t need a West Coast prefix to make drinkers realise it’s not a hazy New England beer – the whole prospect of a cloudy yellow IPA was still a curiosity. Viewed from 2023, where almost all IPAs (and Pale Ales) are now at least a bit hazy, and many are totally opaque with a mouthfeel often described with adjectives like smooth, thick and juicy, those original West Coasters feel like a throwback. That clean clarity and crispness of flavour has gone sweet and squidgy, and it’s not just the IPAs.

Fast-brewed sours like Berliner Weisse and Gose have gone from snappy, light and tart to thickly sweet and sour, heavy with fruit and often other ingredients, and we barely even see those old style names with the beers just called ‘sour’. The popular Imperial Stouts were rich and deeply roasted with viscous mouthfeels and unctuous depths of flavours, and they’ve shifted to being sticky sweet and layered with ingredients like a chocolate sundae. Even the lower strength versions of IPAs and Imperial Stouts have taken on the same big flavours, and flavourings.

If we wanted to drink the highest-rated beers in the UK, then according to Untappd’s 10 highest rated beers across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the top styles are Double IPA (5 of the top 40), Triple IPA (14), Quadruple IPA (3), variants of Imperial Stout (16) and Imperial Fruit Sour (2). These aren’t the kinds of beer most of us are drinking every day or every week, they are the special releases that create hype and maintain it. There aren’t many––or any––breweries with core Triple IPAs or 10% Fruit Sours. But then these scores reflect the global trend of styles which score the highest when people rate them.

According to Untappd’s list of styles which average the highest score, Triple New England IPA is number one followed by different varieties of Imperial Stouts (Milk, Pastry, Coffee, Oatmeal) and some Lambic. In other words, release those beers and they are almost guaranteed to score higher overall than a regular IPA or Stout. It’s just how the ratings sites work. And yet, rate a beer by sentiment instead of volume of alcohol and flavour and we’d get an entirely different list of beers.

The American-based magazine Craft Beer & Brewing, which focuses on homebrewing, polls their readers each year to call in their favourite beers. Placing in the top 10 in 2022 is a list of classic beers: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Pliny the Elder, Allagash White, Guinness, Saison Dupont. Poll British drinkers and we’d surely find a number of traditional cask ales on the list. Those classics persist, and for a reason: high quality balanced beers, which we want to return to regularly, drink more than one of, and which bring us repeated pleasure rather than a one-off five-star high. They may never be the highest rated beers in their country when scored on an app which captures the hype, fashions and zeitgeist, but they are a constant thread which keeps us connected with craft beer in 2013 or 2003 or further back. Those brews are important, they remain important, and they’ll likely still be important in 2033. 

The value of beer rating platforms remains as a way to follow the changing tastes and trends of a particular section of the market, but the more revealing trends are those hidden back from the headliners, where we see how different styles come and go alongside those old favourites. I no longer follow the ratings site like I used to, but still there are those beers––from before 2013 and from today––which bring me a thrill when I hear their name, and get to drink them.