Are craft beers overrated? | The Tylt

It really comes down to a matter of taste. Some people just like their beers cold and cheap. They don't need much else from it. There's a time and place for the refined craft beers, but you can drink a cheap beer whenever you want. There's nothing snobbish about it. There's nothing to "understand." You don't need to develop a palette for it. Cheap beer is good beer. 

Beer snobs are the worst of the bunch. You know the old joke about cheap beer being like having sex in a canoe? I will take a beer that’s "fucking near water" every night of the week over combing out my neck beard while arguing about hop varieties.

For all the debatability of my rant here, let me make one ironclad argument for shitty beer: It pairs really well with food. All food. Think about how well champagne pairs with almost anything. Champagne is not a flavor bomb! It’s bubbly and has a little hint of acid and tannin and is cool and crisp and refreshing. Cheap beer is, no joke, the champagne of beers. And cheap beer and spicy food go together like nothing else. Think about Natty Boh and Old Bay-smothered crabs. Or Asian lagers like Orion and Singha and Tiger, which are all perfect ways to wash down your mapo tofu.

Garrett Oliver responds to David Chang, saying there's nothing wrong with cheap beers—but craft beers are better. Not all craft beers are flavor bombs. There are plenty of lagers out there with similar flavor profiles to Bud Light. Why settle for less when you can have something that's objectively better?

Could I still murder a bag of White Castle cheeseburgers at midnight? Hells yeah! But I don’t go telling Danny Meyer about it every time I see him. White Castle is nostalgic, but Shake Shack burgers make me stupid with happiness. Now I can have a few nice things, and I like it that way. I respect industrial beer, but I don’t have to drink it anymore.

The beauty of craft beer is all of the choices available to you. Don't like the hoppiness of IPAs? Get a stout instead! Or get a lager, a sour, or anything else among the huge multitudes of beers. Why limit yourself to a small range of flavors when you can have it all?