I won’t really be able to top the Full Pint’s takedown of recent “High End” PR campaign. But I would like to add a pair of pennies to it.
America is great at a lot of things. Really shitty at a lot of things too. One thing that we are shitty at is evaluating and then placing people, places or things in their rightful place.
We elevate a brewery or the face of the brewery to a pedestal dismissing along the way the flaws that every person or brewery may have. Once on said pedestal, the process to tear them down begins. Then the negativity lowers the brewery or the face of the brewery way past where it should be. Then the backlash to that backlash happens and we heave back upward again. The way media and the interwebs currently work is basically like a bungee cord or yo-yo. Happens to actors, athletes and politicians too.
But breweries and the people that run them were never probably saints or sinners. They probably were in between in a tighter band of the good to bad spectrum. (See my handy chart below)
So take with multiple grains of salt too many fluffy pieces about the brewmaster or owner of a brewery and be equally wary of the defensive articles that seem to be part of a counter argument. Keep the focus on the beer itself and what the brewery actually does (not what it says it does).
If we all were better at taking the time and care to evaluate we might have seen that the breweries that are now part of the “High End” were all aspiring to be bigger with better being part of the baggage but not the driving motivator.