Update 21/10/14: Box have told me that Criminales was developed for the export market and picked up by B&M, who decided to sell it in the UK. They've also told me that there's a second batch was tweaked a little and is also in B&M - look out for the bottles with the black caps. This post doesn't really apply so much to them then but I think it's still generally valid.

The other day Zak Avery posted this observation. In short, beer isn't going to get better than it is now. To my mind that means both in quality and in the way it's sold and both are intertwined. This was illustrated for me this weekend when sampling Criminales Gangster, which describes itself as a 'mighty IPA' and has, along with the two other beers in the range, been the subject of a glossy promotional campaign and yet is now being sold in B&M stores for 89p a bottle.

Criminales appears to be a brand of well established Midlands brewer Box Steam Brewery, who have been around for for ten years and as such could be seen as just pre-dating or in at the very beginning of the current upsurge in the brewing business. Their beers are well distributed and the two or three I've tasted, both in bottle and on draught are pretty good. Gangster is pretty good as well as a lowish ABV English IPA (not Greene King low, but less than many 'craft' IPAs): it's got a touch of malt and a leafy bitterness with a hint of citrus. I suspect this might be where the problem lies: Criminales appears to be an attempt to get into the current upsurge: striking label designs and a promotional campaign full of bearded young men in order to get onto shelves and into fridges where other bearded young men might see them. This is no bad thing of course, if you're making beer professionally you need to sell it, but at the moment the expectations of that market and the expectations of many longer serving brewers may be different.

I'm middle aged and mad and I have a two year old climbing over me much of the time but from the beer blogs I've read in the last year or so there seem to be some things that define hipster beer (for want of a term): a common expectation is that it's heavy on the citrus hops ('it tastes of grapefruit' came from somewhere - my citations, are unfortunately, always needed) and that a lot of new brewers like to project an extreme or outsider image on the packaging at least. On the brewing side (someone else said this and again there's another 'citation needed' here) one of the things that has caught established brewers on the hop (cough) is that when they try and make beers that meet those expectations, they still use their tried and tested toolset because it works. What doesn't work is that those yellow citrus thirds in those paddles aren't made with leaf hops and your pet yeast strain, and I may be wrong but that's what seems to have happened with Criminales, at least in the case of Gangster. I recognise this because it's something that I've come to a conclusion about myself recently: you aren't going to make an authentic American style IPA or hoppy pale unless you have the right malts (easyish), the right hops, and more to the point the right way of delivering them (without having tested it yet, pellets seem to be the way forward) and perhaps more often overlooked, the right yeast. It's all part of the learning process and one I'm still stumbling forward with in fits and starts.

The promotional campaign also relates to something that was said about a lot of new breweries in the past couple of years, which again I think Zak said (along these lines) get the logo sorted out and the t-shirts printed and the beer is further down the priority list. A new commercial brewer is walking into a busy market right now, and as in any busy market you have to shout to be heard, but the right look is never going to be a substitute for quality product, so the reputation of any brewer is always going to come back to their beer. We are incredibly fortunate with the vast choice that we have now and the temptation for a brewer to step out of a comfort zone or do something ostensibly extreme must be great but in my experience as a semi-rabid ticker it seems to require more than 'add more hops': Box aren't the first to try it and they won't be the last, and there's no reason why they shouldn't but if a brewery has a good reputation for what it does, it seems counterproductive to try and take on what is probably a largely transient market on both sides of the counter, and then to seemingly dump the project in a high street discounter.

Then again, they've probably got their beers in more stores than a lot of other brewers of their size today, which is something, so what do I know?