“I love hazy beers,” Fish Scales tells me. “I like my IPAs like mimosas. I like that juiciness.”
On this count, the rapper—one quarter of Nappy Roots, the Kentucky ensemble that dazzled early-aughts listeners with twangy, chart-topping, country-fied rap hits before Lil Nas X could walk (let alone take his horse down the Old Town Road)—is hardly alone. Since the Brewers Association made it official in 2018, adding categories to accommodate Hazy IPAs, DIPAs, and Pale Ales, the hype surrounding these opaque beers has only grown. Since then, it seems like every brewer in America has hopped on the haze train, including Nappy Roots: the beer-loving band’s brewing endeavor, Atlantucky, recently collaborated on a Milkshake IPA called Nappy Goat with Georgia’s Scofflaw Brewing Co.
There’s been great reporting (including some by this publication!) on how hazy beers got so popular. It usually boils down to some combination of approachable, novel flavors; visually compelling packaging and liquid within; and the enduring power of the scarcity principle.
Fair enough! But you and I? We’re going in a different direction.
Hazy IPAs—along with their heavily hyped ilk, including Pastry Stouts, kettle sours, and slushy Berliner Weisses—have opened up a parallel universe in American craft beer. For argument’s sake, I’m going to shorthand this cohort as “hypebeer”: beers that come in limited runs of pricy, 16oz four-packs; inspire fervent “ISO” comments beneath Instagram posts; and push the definitional boundaries of beer in unfamiliar (and not universally celebrated) new directions. I know those parameters are pretty loose, but given that you’re reading this website in the first place, I’m going to invoke Potter Stewart and guess you probably know hypebeer when you see it.
Some of these beers taste really good, and many don’t. But here’s the thing: if demand for hypebeer is a result of novelty, aesthetics, and scarcity, that means that the liquid’s composition/ingredients/etc.—its “quality,” if you will—isn’t what makes the product valuable. And if that’s true, the enduring popularity and profitability of Hazy IPAs (et al) stands as a lucrative counterpoint to the wider craft brewing industry’s dogmatic fealty to good beer over everything. Can hypebeer exist in parallel with the broader craft beer landscape without lowering new drinkers’ expectations and undermining the whole market?
Maybe the answer lies beyond the bine-covered walls of Castle Craft entirely. The dichotomy emerging in this corner of craft beer—establishment vs. maverick; old heads vs. young guns; trend vs. tradition—has existed in other creative enterprises for a long time.
“Now I see where you’re going,” says Skinny DeVille, Fish Scales’ fellow Nappy Roots rapper and craft beer enthusiast. “I can correlate that exactly to hip hop.”
As rappers who have been turning out records long enough to see both the fall of Myspace and the rise (and maybe fall?) of SoundCloud, Nappy Roots has one foot firmly planted in a market in which the voracious appetites of the digital age have changed not just the game, but its players, too.
To Skinny DeVille, the idea that hypebeers are an inherent denigration of “the craft” smacks of the generational gatekeeping between OGs and rising stars in the hip-hop space.
“If you’re an old-school, golden-era fan, you might not like what Lil Uzi Vert and this new generation is doing with Auto-Tune and singing instead of rapping bars,” he muses, namechecking the Philadelphia outsider whose meteoric rise has made him a purple-haired standard-bearer of SoundCloud rap’s ascendance to the mainstream. It’s not just crotchety old heads who condescend to hip hop’s grassroots upstarts, mind you. In 2017, Wiz Khalifa dissed rappers like Uzi Vert and Lil Yachty as “lil homies” who “don’t want to rap.”
There’s a similar critique among some brewers and beer pundits, too, which the Chicago Tribune’s Josh Noel summed up thusly: “In the rush to lower bitterness, many makers of hazy IPAs have betrayed the notion of balance.” For brewers who dump product, obsess over grain bills, and take great pains to broadcast their commitment to well-made beers, the idea of upstart brewers succeeding with palate-overloading juicebombs is anathema.
Those critiques make a certain amount of sense, but Skinny DeVille is skeptical. When brewers accuse other brewers of cutting corners on their hype-driven beers to cash in on a fad, “It's only because they're trying to be competitive in the market already overcrowded with people doing the same thing,” he hypothesizes.
Whether the quality criticism is motivated by professional jealousy, or inter-generational resentment, or legitimate distress over exploding cans and other objective quality-control issues, is almost besides the point. When a product lives and dies on scarcity, social-media cachet, and zeitgeisty branding, it doesn’t actually need to be high-quality in a conventional sense to succeed.
When it comes to SoundCloud rap, the result is often music that “emphasiz[es] abandon over structure, rawness over dexterity” as the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica put it. To wit: the late South Florida rapper XXXTentacion released a single, “Look At Me!” without even bothering to mix the track (a basic tenet of music production). Writing for GQ, critic Carrie Battan remarked that the song “sounds like it was recorded on a cell phone from inside someone's backpack.” Compositionally and lyrically, it’s a mess. Yet “Look At Me!” has 174 million plays on SoundCloud and another 400 million on YouTube between the audio track and the official music video, proof positive that the song’s popularity isn’t reliant on conventional measures of rap quality.
For a recent analog in the hypebeer space, look no further than the controversy that emerged over the alcohol content of 450 North Brewing Company’s Slushy XL Elephant Ears in December 2019. With ABVs mislabeled at 8% when they were actually closer to 2.5%, the Indiana brewer had no choice but to acknowledge its own calculation process was “critically flawed.” But that did little to stop the hype, reported GBH’s own Kate Bernot (who was all over this story): “Despite these dual quality-control missteps [including exploding cans], customers continue to clamor for the brewery’s releases and voice their support on social media.”
What about those very-obvious compositional flaws? As one 450 North Instagram follower put it: “Literally who cares.”
In December 2019, BeerAdvocate co-founder Todd Alström tweeted a gobsmacking figure: that Other Half Brewing Company had added more new beers to BeerAdvocate than any other breweries in 2019, surpassing 300 total listings. “Other brewers don’t even come close,” he wrote.
Other Half’s co-founder Andrew Burman tells me the number is actually 307. That’s only new beers released in 2019, mind you; all in all, the Brooklyn hazebro favorite put out 572 beers last year, including repeats. More than one new beer per day for a year is—and I can’t stress this enough—an overwhelming amount of new beer.
But maybe overwhelming is the point. If the rise of SoundCloud rap shows us anything, it’s how quantity can supercede quality in a creative enterprise. SoundCloud rappers “took control of their own destinies … succeeding at a pace that the traditional music industry couldn’t keep up with,” wrote Alphonse Pierre for Pitchfork. This rapid-fire release schedule effectively became the product offering, explained Rolling Stone’s David Turner: “An album is nice for narratives, but often these rappers drop singles on SoundCloud that get millions of plays and sell out shows wherever they go.”
In both hip hop and beer, that makes for a lot of noise from which it’s hard to pick out a signal, says Chris Maestro, owner of Brooklyn’s BierWax vinyl and beer bar. “I’m in my forties, so I grew up with ’90s hip-hop,” an era in which 10 or 15 quality album releases per year—like, total, for all artists—would be considered a lot, he says. Now, with untold numbers of maybe-good, maybe-not singles hitting streaming services every day, “It’s so flooded, but a lot of my friends don’t even think good hip hop exists any more.” Well-crafted hip hop, like well-crafted beer, can get lost in the mix, he adds, because craftsmanship is no longer dictating demand—newness is.
No industry, not even music, has internalized and monetized this revelation quite like fast fashion. That business even has a name for this pell-mell production plan: it’s known as “dynamic assortment,” which, as comedian Hasan Minhaj explained on a recent episode of his show, “Patriot Act,” “is just a fancy way of saying 'sell new shit every day.'”
The fashion framework demonstrates how a powerful, novelty-driven, social-media-fueled hype machine can render quality considerations nearly obsolete. When you shop at Zara and H&M, you are not investing in your wardrobe in any meaningful, long-term sense. The products are designed to let you momentarily ape a celebrity’s #fits, not to endure years of wear. “Nobody is gonna argue that fast fashion is good quality at all, but it looks good enough for Instagram, and definitely it has created a culture where people see clothing as ultimately disposable, and that is very problematic,” Alec Leach, a fashion writer and founder of waste-awareness project Future Dust, told me.
In this context, the quality of the garment becomes almost incidental. As Marc Bain wrote in The Atlantic, “happiness in [fast fashion] shopping comes from the pursuit of goods—from the sensation of wanting something.” Companies manufacture accordingly. Zara corrects for its products’ deliberate shittiness simply by making more shitty products.
Do hypebeer makers do likewise? Probably some of ’em! Profit motive is good for some things, none of which include enforcing ethical behavior when the market will bear $25 four-packs, many of which are getting flipped or traded anyway. Plus, “These beers are getting purchased and drank incredibly young,” so they don’t have to be designed with shelf stability in mind, points out Zach Mack, owner of Manhattan’s Alphabet City Beer Company.
Still, fast fashion isn’t a perfect allegory for hypebeast beer. Pastry Stouts and Slushy Sours are not the environmental pox that fast fashion is; no one comments beneath H&M Instagram posts with “ISO” or “FT”; Zara prints money on an order of magnitude that would make J. Wakefield or Tree House look like a child’s lemonade stand. And, crucially, fast fashion’s global model of leveraging economies of scale and ignoring environmental costs to drive prices down is almost diametrically opposed to hazecanneries’ local model of selling small runs of one-off products at a premium. Fast fashion knocks off niche luxury goods; hypebeer is the niche luxury good.
Like SoundCloud rap, fast fashion functions on the opposite of the scarcity principle: this blouse, this banger, none of these things are precious. There’s always more shit in the pipe.
But consider sneakers.
Hypebeer, by contrast, is most certainly driven by scarcity, or what Mack calls “‘can I get it?’ culture.” Between the typically limited runs and the fact that virtually no coveted hazecans will retail outside of their respective brewery’s taproom, demand in this space is innately linked to availability—or lack thereof. This hews particularly closely to the sneaker game. “The two worlds are completely related,” says Robyn G. Williams, the founder of sneaker and beer event company Kicks And Kegs. “You have hypebeasts in both realms.”
In 2018, two German academics published a paper titled “Sole Value” analyzing the esoteric economics of sneaker culture. They found that a sneaker’s value depends on a bunch of small factors, and a few big ones: what it looks like, how hard it is to get ahold of, and whether it’s the product of a collaboration. This is “drop culture,” and it’s dramatically changed the way people assign value to sneakers. The demand for the latest Yeezy Boosts (or whatever) has little to do with their construction or performance, and lots to do with the fact that they’re not readily available. To own them is to demonstrate your cultural clout, economic status, and taste level. Thanks to scarcity, the product becomes more than the sum of its parts.
“You would think that the actual liquid is the most important but it's really not,” muses Williams, mapping the scarcity conversation onto hypebeer. “If that label does not look appealing, if it isn't a collaboration with another hot brewery, then the success of the release will only go so far.” In other words, the beer’s functional value—its flavor, mouthfeel, whatever—is less important than the provenance, packaging, and especially the cachet it conveys upon the person who owns it.
“I think about this shit all the time,” Peter Bissell says. I’d called up the co-founder of Portland, Maine’s Bissell Brothers Brewing Company after reading a Twitter thread he posted in the waning days of the last decade detailing the relationship between the brewery’s super-popular NEIPAs and the rest of its portfolio. Bissell argues that demand (at least for his own beers) “does start with quality, but then it goes to something more … It's a psychological reaction to having something that other people want, and that other people might not be able to get. It’s a status symbol.”
As in the sneaker game, conspicuous consumption and social comparison are the engines that power the hypebeer marketplace. And in both spaces, social media is an essential fuel. “The result is not necessarily a quest for knowledge or understanding of culture, but simply what creates the most validation in the eyes of strangers and peers,” as one fashion publisher told Highsnobiety. It checks out: after all, a status symbol can only bestow status when other people know about it. What better way to tell them than social media?
When it comes to creating that gotta-have-it buzz around hypebeer, Instagram “really blew it up,” says Bissell, who worked as a commercial photographer prior to launching the brewery with his brothers in 2013. You know the shot: the 16oz can with the matte sticker label, tastefully bokeh’d behind a vibrant, opaque brew in globular custom glassware. “That's what's going to develop that FOMO, that’s what's going to hit those primal levers in people's brains,” says Bissell.
“Showing that you have these things [on social media]—it’s proof of your clout,” Ben Robinson, founder and editor-in-chief of the shoe publication Stitchdown and author of “Beer Hacks: 100 Tips, Tricks, and Projects,” told me. A big-time sneakerhead when we worked together at Thrillist, he’s since shifted his footwear focus to premium boots from cult-followed makers like Viberg and Alden. In that game, “Quality is paramount … if you don’t have quality, you don’t have a company,” says Robinson. But with sneakers, “If you can hit a low-level quality, hit a low level of comfort, which I think we can say is the case [for most sneaker companies], they're purely about aesthetics and hype.”
Hypebeers, he speculates, fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
Assuming a baseline of quality mostly works for the sneaker game because only a handful of companies consistently make seriously sought-after shoes. “I already know I like the vibe and style of [Nike] Kyries,” says Catherine Harpe, a beer enthusiast and food-and-beverage professional in Charleston, South Carolina, whose Instagram feed is littered with coveted cans from The Answer Brewpub, Great Notion Brewing, and other hypebeer heavyweights. “Because I trust the brand already … I’m way more likely to pre-buy or try to win a lottery for the latest colorway, etc.”
Similarly, “I make assumptions about the type or style of beer that I’ll get for a certain brewery,” she adds. Still, this approach can only go so far in the hypebeer realm, because the game is fluid and the players are manifold. “You’ve got a few heavy-hitters that have been consistently popular for years,” says Harpe, but “a few breweries [emerge] every year that seem to suddenly be the brewery du jour.”
By contrast: there is no Jordan Brand du jour; there is just Jordan Brand.
Yes, there are fake Jordans, and yes, people have allegedly faked hazecans. We could keep chasing this parallel further down the rabbit hole. But that’s sort of the point. From far away, there are markets that resemble the hypebeer space; up close, none of them are a perfect analog. So we’re left with the question we started with: does hypebeer’s emphasis on novelty, aesthetic, and scarcity subvert the broader craft beer industry’s quality gospel?
Towards the end of our interview, I press the members of Nappy Roots for an answer. Given that they’ve survived two decades of tumult in the rap industry, I figure they’d at least have a clue.
“I think they can coexist,” ventures Skinny DeVille. There are caveats, sure. “You can’t call your ABV 8% when it’s around 2% and get away with it. If you suck at rap, you might get away with it for a little while, but over time, you’re going to have trouble.” These markets may not work as quickly as you want, but they do work, continues DeVille.
“Time and gravity are the true testaments in both these industries, that I’ve experienced,” he says. “You take the time to make the beer, let all the bullshit fall out of it, and let gravity do what it does.”
Words, Dave InfanteIllustrations, Cooper Foszcz
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