You know a trend is already six feet under when kids start roasting their parents for it on TikTok. By this metric, the beer flight’s estimated time of death was somewhere around the beginning of 2023.
But it’s not just Gen Z raising an eyebrow at the once-ubiquitous wooden paddle (or skateboard, or guitar, or metal basket) holding 4-ounce tasting pours. The beer flight debate flares up within the craft beer community every few years. On one side, flights cause staff headaches and present carefully brewed beers in a mediocre light. On the other, they’re deemed tools for exploration, a symbol of craft beer’s accessible spirit. Now, as everything shifts—from taproom aesthetics to the scope of a typical brewery’s offerings—this debate has taken on a new weight.
Craft beer is maturing. Many breweries have trended away from being generalists, instead focusing on a tighter range of styles, or even a single one. A handful of delicately nuanced lagers hardly warrants a sampler board, and the brewers painstakingly making them don’t want those nuances missed with a hodgepodge of quick sips rather than fewer, larger pours that properly showcase the beer. Consumers, too, have matured. In fact, the industry’s current stagnation is due to craft beer no longer enjoying shiny-new-toy positioning. It’s not some hotbed of discovery anymore, fueling a boom of brewery openings. It’s just another beverage category, and its consumers often favor reliability and quality over novelty.
That said, craft beer can’t survive without a concerted effort to continue to engage consumers and make meaningful connections with the newest generation of legal drinkers. That means there will always be a potential audience who isn’t already knowledgeable. The beer flight debate pits a need for craft beer to evolve against this persistent need for inclusive access. Of course, somewhere in here is also the question of whether the flight is the best, most practical way to educate consumers.
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At Fait La Force Brewing in Nashville, Tennessee, founder Parker Loudermilk also feels that flights’ time sink challenges the ideal taproom environment, built on interaction between staff and patrons and intentional conversations about the beer. It’s simply a logistical decision, too. Serving flights requires serious extra storage for the glasses and flight boards.
“It would mean sacrificing something else to make space,” says Loudermilk. “We have chosen to prioritize what we feel lends itself to the best beer-drinking experience, which is appropriate glassware.”
Glassware matched to the style of beer is a hallmark of craft beer’s maturity. Breweries can highlight their styles with traditional vessels, like kölsch in a stange, or seek to bolster a beer’s aroma with more recent developments, like an IPA in a Spiegelau IPA glass. Why take four different beer styles and dump them all into uniform tasters?
“You can’t experience that beer the way it was meant to come across, in a big mug or glass with a beautiful head, poured by a skillful bartender,” says Colin Lenfesty, founder and director of brewing and blending at Holy Mountain Brewing Co. in Seattle. “We have a wide array of beers we wouldn’t do justice to if we served them in tiny glasses.”
Philadelphia’s Human Robot, an acclaimed lager-forward brewery, is a perfect example of how flights just don’t fit with many contemporary breweries’ beer programs or branding. Aiming to present consumers with the subtle nuances of traditional European lagers, cofounder Jake Atkinson says flights were never on the table; the plan was always to provide “proper glassware, proper pours, proper everything.”
The aforementioned Fait La Force and Holy Mountain both offer tap lists 10 to 15 beers strong, but thoughtfully curated with appropriate glassware chosen for each. While they still see the benefit of flights for some breweries, like those who tend to pour a lot of higher-ABV beers, each has chosen to offer smaller pours of each beer, like 6-ouncers or half-pints, so guests can still discover a beer without committing to a full pour.
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Some on the pro-flight side of the debate argue that there is educational value in enabling folks to try multiple beers at once. These aren’t just stalwart breweries taking this stance, as one might expect. Newer breweries, like Talea Beer Co., which opened in 2021 and now has four locations across New York, see them as essential to their mission. “Our target customer is a woman in her mid-20s to mid-30s who may or may not have been to a brewery, but is at least curious enough to come to ours,” says cofounder Tara Hankinson. “That woman probably loves how Instagrammable our flights are.”
Talea’s flights are presented on colorful pressed plywood paddles and are curated by flavor profile, including “Hoppy & Hazy” or “Sour & Fruity,” as well as seasons or occasions, like a “Sweater Weather” flight in fall, a “Barbie” flight this past summer and a nonalcoholic flight for Dry January. It’s hard to argue that they don’t feel right at home in their über-modern locations, each of which looks more like an all-day café in L.A. than your typical brewpub.
“People drink and eat with their eyes,” says Hankinson. “Seeing these beautiful flight boards has changed the impression of what some people thought a brewery could be, and changed the way people think about craft beer and what that experience is.”
Today’s average beer consumer is indeed more informed, and the average brewery more streamlined in its offerings—and yet, as Talea proves, the flight debate isn’t just about what’s best for service and for the beers themselves. Breweries know they need to continue welcoming in new consumers; the question is how each will go about achieving that.
