Beer Baron: My favorite beers of 2022 – Madison.com
I’m thinking of it as the beer world’s Great Flattening.
Good beer has become ubiquitous, at least here in the Midwest, and great beer has become so common that it really isn’t as conspicuous as it used to be. Beer quality is becoming flatter not because the ceiling is falling but because the floor is rising.
When there’s less FOMO, I feel more comfortable choosing beers that are more about balance and drinkability than those that demand your attention. Beers to drink while socializing, rather than something that’s the activity in and of itself. (Hello, lagers and pale ales.)
So the 2022 installment of my beers of the year has far fewer extreme beers and a lot more simplicity. Of course, there are some nods to the biggest news stories of the Wisconsin year in beer — and there were a lot of them.
I suspect that my co-columnist, Draft Queen Katie Herrera, would scoff at the idea of the Great Flattening, and that’s why I’m so glad she’s joined me in the State Journal’s pages. I can have no other perspective and biases and soft spots but my own, and it’s good to have another voice in this space after more than a decade of me hitting you over the head with my own takes on IPAs, stouts and lagers. Just as in beer, variety is the spice of life.
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Katie did steal two of my woulda-been beers of the year in her wrapup last week: Dovetail’s Czech Dark Lager (which has a Madison connection in that its creator, Jenny Pfafflin, is a UW-Madison grad and a fellow editor at The Daily Cardinal back in the late ’90s) and Saison Bay View from Milwaukee’s Supermoon Beer. Katie also, as you may have noticed, drinks around outside Wisconsin a bit more than I do, so I’ll focus on Badger State beers for my reflection.
Cheers to you and yours this new year!
Madtown Nut Brown, Ale Asylum
We’re going to get the bad news out of the way first. After nearly a year of what turned out to be false hopes while it was up for sale, Ale Asylum announced it was finally closing on July 22 — a jarring end to a 17-year run by arguably Madison’s first modern craft brewery. During its slow death march, I had plenty of …….