Is there a way to smash elegancy into simplicity? The new Mazda MX5 is amazing but ask any one of your friends and they would just shrug like it wasn’t worth even contemplating. The humble helles, the bright cousin to the popular pils. Always the lagersmaid, never cutting that bottom fermented cake. Hill Farmstead found a way to make a soft spoken liquid feel assertive.

Autumna has a problem at the outset: the experience is context specific. It is almost never allowed offsite so it remains an amuse bouche for those who make it to the verdant fields. You can predict what happens next. The growlers are 1pp and Munichbeasts resell growlers of helles for over $100. What even

Please ice your tailbone after you no doubt just fell out of your chair. I offered up a Side Project Tete de Cuvee and a guy asked me to add, for this helles. The inherent issue becomes: how can Autumna ever live up to the dilemma that flippers have created? What helles can ever live up to triple digit prices?

The simple answer is, it cant. The complex answer is, it doesn’t matter. It can’t live up to the resale figure because the crisp, deceivingly full bodied challah character can be found for $7 in Andechs. That similarly-hopped creamy mouthfeel you might be able to approximate with Weihenstephaner. It wont be quite the same. The Louisiana Fried Chicken biscuit, touch of perle bergamot. You can grab a weathered 500ml German offering with the white ring on the neck of the recycled bottle, but it wont be oak cask conditioned. Paulaner wont hug you like high crumb sourdough with light minerality. It wont have this bizarre sense of place that terrible editorial writers constantly leverage.

It’s a strange situation where now HF exists as its own competitor. Years ago I would be step mash sabre rattling about how Augustiner can be had for less but, now we have Suarez and Fox Farm and Goldfinger and Bierstadt and pFriem really undermining the idea of perpetual European supremacy. Just enjoy it.

Comparison ultimately can be the thief of joy. Sometimes we have to look beyond secondary and focus on what is in the glass, at a certain point, people are just gonna argue about Chris pratt doing Mario’s voice