Nate’s post on guilty pleasure beers got me thinking about some of the beers, like Red Stripe, that are my guilty pleasure beers.  I considered putting Fat Tire by New Belgian as one of them.  But after hanging out with a friend tonight and putting nostalgia aside, Fat Tire is really a balanced and good beer.

Forget the measures of niche uniqueness and abstractions about it simply being an Amber Ale among Imperial Stouts. Seriously, the grain pop and session smoothness of it makes me want to write a brief post about the beer.  It also makes me curious about the point at which an Amber Ale became and implicit anathema among crafties (I’ve never heard the term so I’m coining it…at least in my mind).  To be honest, I can get on board with notion that the ubiquitous Amber Ales at the the seemingly endless brew pubs are mediocre or worse.  However, I can’t get hop on the conceptual train that writes off a whole category of beer.

It may be an inspired rant or it may seem like sentimental drivel, depending on your outlook, but why is solid beer getting such a bad name?  To be clear, I enjoy wasabi flavored ice cream with sushi mix-ins as much as the next person, but I sometimes long for the well made vanilla.

Am I crazy?  What do you think?  And I mean the rest of what I’ve said, not my mental status…perhaps that’s self-evident.