My wife and I were in Lake Geneva, WI for the weekend and we went to a nice restaurant. There was some local beer that we ordered and I feel like it was labeled as an amber ale. The pints showed up and we both looked at each other like "whoa". The beer literally looked like dirty dishwater. It was sort of grayish and totally cloudy. We both took a sip and the look on our faces must have been priceless because it was genuinely awful. Like I can't believe they released this product to the public. Horrific. We both choked down about half of it and then ordered something else that was much better. I feel bad for the brewery because they spend all this money and go through all this red tape and probably can't afford to throw out however much beer they made but once you release a beer like this your image is going to suffer.
There was one regional brewer here in the late 2000s that was notoriously bad (Trafalgar brewery https://www.ratebeer.com/Ratings/Beer/ShowBrewer.asp?BrewerID=1976 ). but somehow they were "in" with the provincial alcohol corporation and stuck around forever despite horrendous products at their best and simply bizarre quality problems at their worst. i had a pale ale i tried of theirs that just had basically yeast sludge in it, like spoonfuls of it.
i rarely try craft brands i haven't heard multiple good things about because i hate paying money to be disappointed.
can't even imagine some craft brewery in wisconsin not taking things seriously when their competition is new glarus and more.
It's weird how some places stick around. There is a little quasi-country town near me (Long Grove) and people go there to go to little shops, antiques, furniture places, little restaurants, etc. and a brewery opened there. There have a really nice building and a ton of space outdoors with a deck and picnic tables outside, a fire pit, they built a stage, there is nice outdoor lighting at night, they have food trucks come into the parking lot for eats, etc. and it's really done up nicely. The trouble is that I have never had a decent beer there. Truly. There is a "Bohemian Pilsner" that is a cloudy, funky mess. There is a pale ale that is passable. They made a dunkel that tastes like it's 75% roasted barley. Many of the styles they make are WAY outside of the average beer-drinkers experience and so those beers don't sell. They made a fruit beer that I tried... tasted awful. It seems to me that if you have a "craft brewery" you can brew and attempt to sell
any style but I feel like you have to have a well-made pale beer of some type: American Lager, German Pilsner, Bohemian Pilsner, Helles, Blonde Ale, Kolsch, American Wheat, etc. You know that some people are going in there saying "Well, I usually drink Coors Light so tell me what to order". You
could say "GET TF OUTTA MY BAR, DUDE!" or you could say, "Try our Blonde Ale. It's not Coors Light but I think you'll like it".