Design and novelty are clearly the main drivers of the popularity of craft beers right now. But the style also has something to do with it. Anyone who has paid attention to our local craft beer scene in recent years can see that the dominant trend is for a richer, richer flavor. Hazy IPAs (and misty double IPAs), with their explosively juicy tropical fruit notes, are having a real time. “Hazys is definitely the defending champion right now,” Beth Wathen, co-owner of the City Beer Store in San Francisco, told me.

The offshoots of the Misty IPA include the IPA smoothie and the IPA milkshake (basically a misty brewed with milk sugar), which turn the flavor and texture up to 11. These have their own offshoots, like the sour IPA smoothie. Humble Sea even brings out a slushie machine in its Santa Cruz taproom to turn its smoothie beers into a full-fledged frozen treat, and will occasionally push its pastry stouts into a serving machine.

I’m here for it all, and I love that craft beer is having so much fun right now. God knows we need to have fun! I love the nostalgia factor of slushie and soft-serve machines, the tireless creativity of brewers who invent new beer recipes every day, and knowing that I don’t have to look far to find a beer that has the taste nothing I have ever tasted before.

But I wouldn’t describe this craft beer moment as “balanced,” and there’s no doubt in my mind that the flavorful intensity creates a certain desire for lighter, more subtle styles. (That’s not a whole new feeling: I wrote last year about the return of artisanal lagers.) This kind of dynamic will sound familiar to California wine geeks, who have been dying for the past 15 years. during the transition to the larger, more daring wines that became popular in the 1990s and early 2000s. These “hedonistic fruit bombs”, as one famous wine critic liked to call them, gave way to a new era of bright, tangy and low alcohol wines.

That’s what makes me all the more grateful for Moonlight, which has been gloriously oblivious to trends for almost three decades now. Its founder, Brian Hunt, is a beer specialist (PSA: anyone curious about his backstory should read Lou Bustamante’s excellent 2018 profile). Moonlight’s flagship product, Death & Taxes, is a non-trendy beer – a Schwarzbier, or black ale, delivering the malty, roasted richness you’d expect from a dark beer, but in a crunchy, ultralight package. Pilsner Reality Czeck (a type of blond beer) reminds me of very good Chardonnay: floral, silky, very slightly creamy, but above all refreshing.

They aren’t great flavor beers, but for my palate they offer a lot of flavor – you just have to look for it.

Last weekend at my local brewery, Richmond Republic, I drank a Moonlight beer that I had never had before called Toast. Advertised as “lightly burnt”, this is an aged lager, which is about as old-fashioned as I can imagine. I liked it. Like Death & Taxes, it had a lot of the rewarding notes you’d expect from a fuller beer: caramel, fresh baked bread, coffee beans when they’ve just gone through the mill. But the beer stayed light on its feet, never heavy, refreshing with every sip, pleasantly frothy.

I will continue to drink the hazy IPAs. But when they go out of style, one day, I will continue to drink the balanced and refreshing lagers of Moonlight.

What else am I writing

• The Pey-Marin vineyards, which have carried the torch of high-quality winemaking to the cold and extreme coast of Marin County for the past 21 years, will close their doors and no longer produce wine. The move has been a long time coming, Jonathan Pey told me, but the increasing difficulty of farming there amid drought, smoke from wildfires and other effects of climate change catalyzed the decision.

• My wine selection this week is a vintage called Garrigue, from Domaine de la Terre Rouge in the Sierra foothills. It’s a complex wine, especially for its $ 25 price point, and pays homage to the unusual Cabernet-Syrah blend from an original winery in southern France called Domaine de Trevallon.

What i read

• Traditional Malaysian drinks like toddy, tapai and tuak – fermented from coconuts, rice, cassava and other starches – are at risk of being lost, but some producers are trying to raise awareness and increase demand for these drinks. In Whetstone, Annie Hariharan and Alia Ali explore these efforts.

• In Alta, Sydney Love writes about the open letter two workers in the Central Coast wine industry, Simonne Mitchelson and Justin Trabue, wrote to their local wine community following the murder of George Floyd, asking for their support for racial justice. The letter, and the activism that followed it, led to a college scholarship, a fund with a California nonprofit, and a mission-based wine club.

• A a small controversy erupted in Quebec after police in the province seized large quantities of California sacramental wine. Beyond the complexities of Canadian liquor law, I found this interesting for the requirement that wines used in Catholic Mass must be “natural”, that is, “uncorrupted and exempt. of foreign substances ”. Maybe there is an untapped market for pure hard natural wines here!

Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle wine critic. Follow us on twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob