In Praise of Flagships

I will confess that I had completely forgotten about Flagship February until Jeff Alworth tweeted the following:

I never seem to have enough bandwidth to participate in #FlagshipFebruary, but I will throw this out there.

Every beer drinker needs to have one mass market lager they love and drink. (Examine your life choices if you don’t.) What’s yours?

— Jeff Alworth (@Beervana) February 17, 2021

Despite my forgetfulness, I think celebrating flagship beers is most definitely a good thing.

Flagship beers tell you so much about the brewery behind them, as well as giving the drinker a sense of what to expect from a brewery's core line-up. If the flagship is a well made beer, regardless of style, you can usually be fairly confident that the rest of the range is likely to be worth drinking. The flagship beer is the one that opens the door, builds trust, and carries the persona, for want of a better word, of the brewery.

A prime example of this would be Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, perhaps the most flaghshippy craft beer in the entire craft beer universe, and a very strong contender for being the flagship of craft beer, full stop. When Mrs V and I moved over from Prague to the US back in 2009, I knew I liked SNPA having tried it in Galway, and so I was thrilled to have easy access to what is by any grown up's standards a classic, world class, beer. Having established trust in a brewery, I was happy to spend cash on other Sierra Nevada beers, including at one memorable night at Beer Run doing a side by side comparison of Torpedo on regular CO2 and pulled through a beer engine. Ah those were the days, when Beer Run had a beer engine and regular real ale. I don't drink as much Sierra Nevada beer as I once did, but still 12 packs of canned SNPA are a ready go-to beer, as is Southern Gothic whenever I see it, and as a result of that trust built up I'll try their versions of styles I rarely drink, such as Bigfoot.

When I think more closely on my drinking these days, I find that I drink far more flagships that rarities, special releases, collaborations, or any other such marketing gimmick beers. I am sure that likely says more about me as a drinker than the beer industry, but I actually dread the day when breweries are little more than revolving doors of one-offs.

Flagship beers are statements of identity. They tell you how the brewery perceives itself, and how it wants you, the consumer, to perceive them. Perhaps more so than the calling cards of marketing such as logos, type faces, and colour choices, it is the beer marked out as the leader that defines a brewery.