You've got it right. It's not that more hops = better beer. It's that more hops = easier beer. Malt-forward beers are much more difficult to get right, and require a lot of very careful attention to detail. Hops are easy: Just throw them into the batch and set a timer. Their strong flavor is also useful for masking a lot of consistency problems and off-flavors that might stem from other, trickier parts of the brew process.

The brewmaster of a new craft brewery is likely an amateur who recently went pro, and has very little practice brewing at an industrial scale. It's an over-crowded market right now, too, so they're operating on very tight margins and working with a clientele that can afford to be very picky. The days when one could get away with marketing something like Shiner Bock as a bock are long gone. So they can't afford to burn a lot of money working out why a recipe that yielded a perfect malt aroma at a 5 gallon batch size comes out flat and lifeless when scaled up to 30 barrels. They'd be out of business before they got it pinned down. Hops are easy, though, so the hoppy beer brewer is more likely to survive.

I suspect that this effect continues on to packaging and distribution: Hoppy beers can handle some amount of oxidation where cream ales and lagers quickly start to taste like cardboard. That's useful in an overcrowded market where your beer might spend a few months sitting on a shelf before anyone drinks it. (Hopefully this becomes less of a thing as cans, which have a longer shelf life than bottles, increase in popularity.) And there's no way that your local TGI Bennihan's or the "537 beers on tap" bar is staying on top of cleaning their tap lines, but, again, hops can help mask the funk.

It's also something of an open secret among beer judges that hoppy beers are at an unfair advantage to win the "best in show" prize. Because the final selection for that prize comes at the end of the day, after the judges' palates have been deadened by endless beer tasting, and hops are about the only flavor component that is as subjectively noticeable at the end of the show as it was in the morning. Any amateur brewer who's involved in the beer competition circuit is going to be influenced by that.

Can I look forward to the days when one can't get away with marketing American IPAs as IPAs? Because they're nothing like the British originals. I was also a homebrewer and a beer judge for a short time. That was back in the day (the 80s) when Pilsner Urquell was still the most bitter beer in the world. There was a stereotypical homebrewer who used to dump loads of hops in his beers as a sort of "hot sauce penis waver" to express his manliness. These guys paid no attention to beer style or brewing history. This mindset went on to have the dominant influence on the American microbrew industry, which has included varying degrees of misapplication of beer style claims. I've long given up on trying beer from American brewers as only a few of them use any degree of real creativity and understanding that malt does more than just provide color and something for yeast to create alcohol with. Unfortunately, the rise of microbrews inevitably brought the demise of imports, relatively speaking. I could get on board with the canned beer fad if the labels were even remotely readable, but like their overhopped beer, art and nuance is something that is wielded like a sledgehammer to clobber us over our heads.

If it's any consolation, at least in the classification system used by the BJCP style guidelines, they aren't even in the same general category. But one could argue that the names used in a beer judging rubric and the names used for the purposes of marketing beer are not, despite the use of some common language, the same thing.

It's also, I think, not quite correct to blame the development of American IPA solely on machismo. That's undeniably a big part of it nowadays, but, when the style developed, it was much more about adapting the basic idea of an English IPA to taste good using the grain and hops that were being grown in North America.

For a good (mostly British-focused) blog that covers some of this history in excruciating details, see Shut Up About Barclay Perkins.

This is a very loose implication that I won't bother addressing, nor your use of the word "solely".

Thinking of it, all the times I remember being really knocked off my feet by a malt-forward beer was on draft at small scale breweries.

It's not just your personal theory! It's absolutely correct. In my neophyte brewing years if something came out bad, I'd just chuck more hops in the carboy and call it an IPA (back when it was rare and unusual).

It's also arguably not very good for men. Hops are fairly estrogenic. Might help with post-menopausal bone density though! https://www.naturalmedicinejournal.com/journal/2010-04/beer-...

Phytoestrogens don't really work on humans though. They mostly just antagonize the estrogen receptor, which means they bind to the receptor without activating it. This means they can actually be harmful to women on HRT because they make the HRT less effective.

https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/120078-hops-and-women-8...

I don't know if it's comparable, but my understanding is that over time caffeine's binding to adenosine receptors causes more receptors to be produced, leading to increased sensitivity to adenosine and so you get more drowsy than you otherwise would when caffeine's not present.

If that same effect applies to estrogen receptors, that would make men more sensitive to estrogen?

- Americans don’t really get exposed to good lagers and pilseners. We get Bud[1], not Budvar. So there’s no expectation that beers in those categories could possibly be “good”. IPAs don’t have the same baggage.

- For the same reason, it’s easier to differentiate from the big brands on a supermarket shelf. You get to be your own category, not just the more expensive version of what people think of as regular beer.

- Maximalist American food culture. It’s like when bacon became a meme and suddenly everything was covered in bacon. Fatty ramen became a trend for the same reason: it’s a simple, super-saturated flavor that’s easy to crank up to 11.

- Like you mention, it’s easier to brew.

The worst is when you’re given a menu of 40 indistinguishable IPAs all called like “HOPULATOR 9000” or whatever. Sometimes I just want to go out for a brewski, why did that have to get complicated?

[1]You know what? Bud on draft is fine. It’s not the best, but I like it, and I’ll certainly take a $3 pint of bud over a $9 snifter of “gnarly Steve’s surfs up mango hop smasher” or whatever.

Oh man, was with you till the very end. Most places will have something on tap that qualifies as real beer. PBR, Yuengling, Stella, and Pilsner Urquell are all great lagers. Confronted with 40 taps of HOPULUS PRIME (or whatever), I'll happily swill them all day in a non-ironic, non-cheapskate, non-hipster fashion. But rice adjuncts? No thank you.

I think bud actually only uses rice and 6-row (i.e. old-style, harder to convert) barley. I could be mistaken about that, though.

At any rate, the adjunct grains used in US "megabrews" aren't just there because they're cheaper than barley. They're very much a part of the flavor profile, and a big part of the style. Whether or not you consider that a positive is personal preference, but they're not bad beers at all.

My problem with Bud is it doesn’t have much flavor or character for a pilsner - especially the Lite. Carbonated malt pop.

On the flavor part, I agree. I prefer Miller if we're going with the big breweries. Doesn't make it a bad beer, though, just a lighter profile.

Ehhh, I wouldn't necessarily put "fatty" ramen in that position.

Legitimate ramen from Japan's original, basic purpose was food that could be eaten quickly by salarymen late at night/on their way home after work/drinking.

There's huge variety in ramen, and I think the fattier ones were made for a purpose too. Not just flavor, though that definitely is a result as well, but also because of the kind of environment there was in Japan, where the people there wanted something a bit heavier in flavor in a hot bowl on cold nights.

Pretty much every major craft brewery nowadays has a high-quality pale session beer. Sometimes it's a pilsner (both Euro style and American pre-Prohibition style), sometimes it's a golden ale, and sometimes it's a Kölsch, and hell I've even seen one brewery with a Dortmund-style lager, but regardless of which it is, they're typically among the brewery's top sellers.

They're not the sexy beers that grab headlines, but they're actually the ones doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the brewery's bottom line.

Ten years ago, you would have been absolutely right, but pale session beers have come back in a huge way, and we now have no shortage of them. They exist, they're high-quality, and they sell, but you don't see people talking about them much because there's just not much to talk about. It's the beer you order multiples of when you're hanging out with your friends and don't want to get too full or too drunk too fast, and there's nothing particularly _interesting_ about that.

You are right about IPAs being easy to cover up poor brews. I brew, and people are really surprised when I tell them one of the hardest possible beers to brew would be a Budweiser clone, and one of the easiest is an IPA. Most IPA's have a very simple single malt and mash cycle, and it is essentially a hot tea made with hops. Then most of them are fermented. with some Safale high attenuation pretty bland US-05 yeast derivative. Any error or not even error with a pale lager like Budweiser would be exposed. It also takes a long time to make lagers due to the lagering progress and fermentation needing refrigeration.

The problem with people drinking these fresh dank double IPAs all the time is that every other style then seems bland as your taste buds are completely destroyed from drinking 100 IBU triple dry hopped beer. Then eventually you get sick of it, and every hazy juicy IPA starts becoming the same. There are way too many breweries now making generic silver cans filled with double IPA with some interesting art sticker. I'd short the craft beer industry if it were a stock.

I'm not really a beer person, but when I am its usually Coors Banquet or Pacifico, both of which I find tasty and refreshing (particularly on a hot day, with BBQ or Mexican). I also love Yuengling when I'm in the area for it, its the only beer I've gone out of my way to order.

I personally will drink an IPA from time to time, but will gladly drink any style really and particularly like stouts, German/Belgian beers. I also agree with the other child comment and will crack open a Budweiser gladly on a summer day on the beach. It is actually a very well executed beer, it is designed to be smooth and mild. I think the aversion to lagers is some amount of snobbery. I don't drink beers for image so don't care!

I equate people who like really strong IPAs to people who are into extreme hot sauce just for the sake of injuring themselves with something that's overly hot.

Is there really any flavor to IPAs with IBUs that are through the roof? No, not at all.

I'm glad on the east coast I have a variety of beer to choose from that aren't IPAs

Yes, there is good, tasty flavor to hops, provided you're not on the sensitive side of the bitter tasting spectrum. The bitter flavor overwhelms everything for some, but not all.

If you're curious, there are bitter tasting test strips like these which not everyone is sensitive to. https://www.amazon.com/Nasco-PTC-Paper-Strips-Vial/dp/B001D7...

The cider-y taste ("green-apple character" I believe) you can taste in the Belgian beer Orval is considered an off-flavor in IPAs and I'm pretty it was reasonably common high hop beers in the 90s and early 2000s.

Indeed, my suspicion is that homebrewing first create a wide variety of flavors and approaches through accidents but once the machinery for determining the correct flavors became established, small brewers followed with beers that has nothing strange or unusual at all and so could only distinguished by their hop-levels.

Worth noting that the citrusy highly carbonated brews are 'American IPA's, English or 'Imperial' IPAs are much less citrusy, if at all, and much much much less carbonated.

That's changing a bit - much to my disappointment, I don't like the citrus either, much less the high carbonation - with the craftier 'craft' beers, but generally they will market themselves as American IPAs, or have a citrusy name or label, so you can make your choice accordingly.

I think the unspecified IPA you often find will be American. And jeesh, there far too many of them. Like the original cheap American lager form, it's OK 'till you've had far too much of it and then you never want it again.

I'd also add "provided you didn't boil the shit out of them, destroying the essential oils and isomerizing the alpha acids". Generally speaking, a particular batch of hops can add either bitterness or flavor but not both. If you want both, you add multiple batches.

A little rundown of the chemicals in hops and how they affect the beer depending on how you add it.

Hops contain three things:

- Alpha acids. They're tasteless on their own, and when you boil them, they isomerize, and isomerized alpha acids taste bitter. All the bitterness in hoppy beers come from these.

- Beta acids. People don't talk about these much. They're generally associated with off flavors, and most cultivars try to minimize them.

- Essential oils. This is where the real flavors in hops come from. Different cultivars contain different essential oils that give off different flavors. European hops tend to have earthy, floral, and spicy flavors ("spicy" as in traditional European spices, e.g. allspice, not "spicy" as in chile peppers), and American hops lean towards pine and citrus flavors. Some newer American cultivars go past just "citrus" and into a wider variety of stone fruits; these tend to form the base of New England IPAs. Unfortunately, boiling the hops destroys much of the essential oils, so any hop you use for bittering will provide little flavor.

Different cultivars of hops provide these in different amounts. Hops that are high in alpha acids but low in essential oils are called "bittering hops" because all they're good for is adding them during the boil to add bitterness. Hops that are high in essential oils but low in alpha acids are called "aroma hops" because all they're good for is to add them later in the process to add aroma and flavor to the beer.

There are basically three points where you can add hops into the beer:

- At the beginning of the boil. This thoroughly isomerizes the alpha acids and destroys much of the essential oils, contributing bitterness but little flavor. If you want a bitter beer, throw a bunch of high-alpha hops in at this stage. If you don't like bitterness, just throw in enough hops to protect the beer from spoilage.

- Later in the boil. This contributes a small amount of bitterness and a decent amount of flavor. Unless the beer is _packed_ with hop flavor, you can expect much of the hop flavor to come from this stage.

- After the boil is over. This is called "dry-hopping". This contributes no bitterness whatsoever and adds a ton of flavor, provided you use hops that have a large amount of essential oils. Beers that have intense hop flavors make extensive use of dry-hopping. Extreme west-coast IPAs tend to make heavy use of both hopping during the boil and dry-hopping, thus providing strong bitterness and flavor. New England IPAs, on the other hand, rely almost entirely on dry-hopping to bring out every nuance of the essential oils, to the point where a new marketing term has been coined: "double dry-hopped", or DDH. It doesn't really mean anything, there's no official threshold for what counts as "double", but you can safely assume that any beer marketed as a DDHIPA is going to be packed with hop flavor thanks to extensive dry-hopping. While there are a few west coast DDHIPAs, most beers labelled as DDHIPA are New England-style, where dry-hopping is especially important. In those beers, the H does double duty and also stands for "hazy". Why? Because when you aggressively dry-hop a beer, hop particles will actually become suspended in the drink giving it a cloudy appearance. You can filter them out if you want to, but New England-style IPAs almost never do so because they've turned the haze into a selling point (west coast IPAs, on the other hand, almost always filter them), which is why most of us who drink them just call them "hazies".

tl;dr If you think you don't like hops because they're too bitter, go find something that's aggressively dry-hopped with very little hops being added during the boil. You'll find out that hops actually taste pretty good and that what you didn't like was just the effect of boiling them.

In my experience, heavy dry-hopping contributes noticeable bitterness. If you have access to hops this is easy enough to confirm: get some lightly hopped beer, add a lot of hops (heavily hopped New England style IPAs can use 1oz/gal or more for dry hopping), and let it sit for a few days. After you've strained the hops out you should be able to taste the extra bitterness in the beer. A quick web search found this blog post with some explanation:

https://www.beervanablog.com/beervana/2017/4/17/yes-dry-hopp...

Yes. Yes there is. As someone with acid reflux, I can't stand spicy foods but love IPAs.

For me it is to opposite, I have no problem with IPA and want them as hoppy as they get. But some pilsners triggers the reflux consistently. I think for me it is related to how carbonated they are.

I'm glad we now have a good selection and can select what we want, and not having it as it was 10+ years ago where we had 5-10 types of pilsners/light lagers to select from

For what it's worth, more hops absolutely masks errors in brewing. It's something that any homebrewer finds out very quickly.

IPA's/etc are very easy to get a drinkable beer out of no matter how many mistakes you make. (To be fair, it's not just IPA's that are forgiving. Weissbiers are actually quite easy to brew due to the yeast hiding off flavors nicely, and ambers can be easy due to lots of caramelized, unfermentable sugars hiding off flavors. You can overdo the sweetness in an amber or mess up the fermentation in a wheat more easily than you can make an undrinkable IPA, though.) That's not to say that really good IPAs are easy to brew, just that you'll get something drinkable no matter what.

Any commercial brewery _should_ be beyond basic mistakes, but scaling brewing is hard. What I'm saying really only applies to homebrewers, but I suspect it carries over to smaller breweries as well.

The hardest beers to brew well are actually Pilsners, Lagers, and American-style pilsners/mega-brews. Anything with very clean, crisp flavors. I hate to say it, but if you want to really test your skills, try brewing a miller lite clone... This is especially true in homebrewing, where proper lagering/aging and fermenting at low temps needed for lager yeasts used by pilsners/lagers/etc is difficult.

At any rate, my hat is off to Czech brewers. Trying to brew a really good pilsner or bohemian lager is damned hard to perfect, and it's an absolutely sublime style when done right. Sadly, it's somewhat rare to find a brewery in the US that can do it well.

I feel your comment about the "token" stout; I used to go to the Refuge (https://www.refugesc.com/) quite often but one of the reasons I stopped is because their beer list is so overwhelmingly Belgian and I just want a regular stout or porter now and again.

I'm increasingly suspicious that (typically) high relative ABV of high-IBU beers is a significant factor in influencing consumer choice, perhaps moreso than hops enthusiasts would like to admit.

(see the Alcohol By Volume graph).

I'd love to see data on sales of beer in relation to ABV though.

Bingo. It's to the point now where OG craft breweries are faced with cutting their once staple lines to replace them with IPAs. IPAs represent 26% of the craft beer market and its still growing.

IPAs may have originally flooded the craft beer market because they are easier to brew consistently and keep longer on the shelf. But they've rocketed to the top of the beer sales charts because the people who buy beer love hops.

People have been talking about the "next IPA" for years now. Yet there's no indication that another style is going to usurp them. In fact, it's somewhat the opposite, as other styles are being adapted into IPAs. Nobody has made a heffeweizen IPA yet, so I think there's still further to go.

Even with a relatively interesting scene, my feeling is that beer has lost a certain amount of novelty and glamour around here. Bars are less central to young people's dating lives. It's more novel/fashionable to be a connoisseur of cocktails or marijuana strains. People are more healthy-oriented than ever, and beer is one of the more calorie-heavy ways of getting a buzz.

The beer of northern New England is mostly driven by what tourists from Boston and NYC (more for Vermont than the other two) will shell out $10 for and a great many of those people want an IPA that you can patch the road with so that's what gets brewed. I can't comment on what things were like 10+yr ago since I wasn't paying attention to beer then.

1st tier - California, Oregon, Washington - if its from a smallish brewery, it will be a good, hoppy IPA

2nd tier - Colorado / Idaho / Nevada / Montana - has some good IPAs, but could be hit or miss

3rd tier - Rest of USA - very hit or miss. At best it will be as good as a good west coast beer and at worst it will be strange and malty

4th tier - Australia / New Zeland - maybe best non USA IPAs ive ever had was from Pirate Brewing in Australia. This might be because of the high quality of new zeland hops.

5th tier Europe - Good luck! Had some pretty good IPAs in Ireland, and maybe some half decent ones from Britain, but overall the stuff they market as "IPA" tastes wrong, malty and flat.

6th tier Asia - Had a good ipa (on tap!) from Demo Pizza bar in Yangshuo China. Also some good ones in Hong Kong 7th tier: Africa - had one or two good IPAs in South Africa but for the most part its not really IPA

Overall, I think a good predictive equation for the quality of your IPA would be

quality = 1 / (distance_from_usa_west_coast * distance_from_a_city_with_brew_scene).

Ha! Because what you're expecting and looking for is an 'American IPA' (style not origin). The other half are English or Imperial (there is sometimes a technical and sometimes only marketing distinction to be made between the latter two) IPAs.

Personally, the stuff America 'markets as "IPA" tastes wrong" - citrusy and way over-carbonated!

It's unfortunate that they're made to sound so similar in my opinion, they're pretty different styles. Classic IPAs are much closer to other British bitters than they are to 'American IPA' (or to 'IPA' sold in America).

"Imperial" is a tough descriptor for a British style, at least in America, because here it's usually used to signify something akin to "double": more alcoholic, more hoppy, just generally "more."

'Imperial IPA' in Britain denotes a more traditional style - of course it's not regulated, but the one thing you can be certain of is that it won't be in the 'American IPA' style (you can get British made IPAs sold as 'American IPA', i.e. it is meant as a classifier of style, not orgin).

Traditional IPAs are low in carbonation even among British ales, highly hopped (boiled and dry), and 6-9%.

In short, the way you're saying it's used in America doesn't sound wrong to me!

(I believe dry hopping actually originated with the IPA, and its long voyage from London docks to India.)

The real story is that hoppy beer sells. That's the whole story; there's no other reason why they are so prevalent. The end.

To make these beers, here's what you have to deal with:

* The Hop market! Congratulations new brewery, you're either paying 2 or 3 times as much for popular hop varieties, or else you're going without and can suck on some Cascade. Good luck negotiating a reasonable contract for next year buying in pitiful amounts. You get to subject yourself and your razor-thin margins to the spot market.

* Hop quality. Hops age and oxidize fairly easily, and variability year to year is substantial. If you want any kind of quality and consistency, it's a big job to closely monitor your key ingredient.

* Hopping technique. Bittering, flavor, aroma, Whirlpool, hopstands, dry hopping, double-dry hopping, each pose unique challenges and opportunities, and brewers fuck it up all. the. time. Good hopping requires careful attention to process, and depends greatly on your highly variable ingredients. Get it wrong and some common flavor descriptors are: cat-piss, vegetal, astringent, etc. Truly, there is a whole cornucopia of shitty IPAs.

* DO - dissolved oxygen. Oxygen destroys hoppy beer very easily. Your process better be perfect, or else you better be pushing that shit out within a week or two. Distribution is a fool's errand unless you're a big fish.

* Hop bite. Basically this comes down to filtration, which smaller operations may not do. Fairly easy to avoid, but so very, very common.

FWIW, weissbier is a lot easier to brew. Find a maltster that works for you, test a couple different yeasts and fermentation profiles, and you're done. Maltsters are fucking legends that make a terrifically consistent product (not the bougie 'indie' guys, the real legends). And yeast suppliers aren't far off.

Now, the Germans will faff off about decoctions and hot-side oxygen and all that, and they do make good beer, but you can make really solid beer without even thinking of all that. I will drink a fresh weissbier every time over getting something imported from Germany to the US. Most of the time, I'll pick it over what you get in the German supermarkets.

It's a strange side effect of craft beer's "elevated" status. Multiple breweries in the same town need to differentiate themselves as if they are farms growing the same product acres apart. The more I think about the bizarre trends in the industry, the more I appreciate beer history.

I've talked to many brewers and they said they would love to make more pales and lagers and sessions but that they don't sell.

In double-blinded taste tests conducted in my home, the adults concluded that Vienna lagers are the best, and IPAs are the worst.

So I would like to subscribe to your theory that brewers that are bad at brewing just throw more hops at the problem, so they can more easily sell their mistakes. Got some skunk's bathwater? Throw some hops in it!

The IPA was invented because beer shipped to India acquired off flavors due to the longer travel times. It is almost by definition bad beer.

More porter was shipped to India than pale ale. Would you consider porter by definition a bad beer?

Porter was already strongly hopped--a practice that overwhelms other flavors introduced in the brewing process, not just those that develop during transport. As a style of beer, yes, it is worse than more lightly hopped styles.

Or at least that's what the subjective testing in my household shows. De gustibus non est disputandum. Your own testing might rank porters differently, according to your own tastes. But if the test subject does not specifically enjoy the flavor imparted by hops, then all strongly-hopped beers will rank poorly. For someone that does really like hops, all the beers that are basically carbonated alcoholic hop juice will rank highly.

As for myself, I hate IPAs. In a double-blind test, I will always rank all the IPAs in the test set as dead last, with tasting notes such as "worst beer I have ever tasted" and "this beer causes suicidal ideation". It's still okay for other people to like them, I suppose, but I will never be able to understand those who do.

There are more breweries learning how to do good lagers but still few and far between.

I've been to both, and while Portland Maine has a surprising number of breweries for its size, Portland Oregon had way more. A quick google search confirms Portland OR has more than twice as many as Portland ME.

If you include the Portland OR metro area, it has more breweries than the entire state of Maine.

That may be but Portland, Oregon has some excellent cider as well. Belmont Station in Hollywood is pretty much my go to place, they've a diverse selection of beer and cider.

To be clear Belmont Station has both a bar (biercafé in hipster speak) and a store. The store has a really great selection of both beer and cider. My favorite is Reverand Nat's sour cherry — self-described as more of a lambic beer than a cider.

Their selection of California stuff isn't quite up to snuff but they carry 2 Towns as well — a friend had explain that reference to me.

You can't even trust bartenders to pour proper wells these days, charging $13 for an 8oz glass of Coca Cola and a drop of well brand just so you can see them reach for the bottle. The IPA fits in line with my boozehound on a budget lifestyle and always is the stated ABV.

I think there is something to this. the same happens to other foods too. Just make them extremely spicy, cheesy or sweet and you don’t have to worry about taste subtleties anymore.

Microbrewers don't actually think that.

The reason that a lot of them flood their beer with hops, is because:

1. It is extremely difficult to brew consistent batches of beer, week after week, month after month.

2. The extreme bitterness of hops masks the taste of pretty much everything... Including the inconsistencies.

So even if they aren't papering over actual errors in the brewing process, they are papering over inconsistencies.

Along those lines, I wish more microbreweries would put out sessionable beers that still taste good. Despite the variety of styles, it seems like most beers are in the 6%-7% at least, often more. As much as I love a good stout or IPA, sometimes I want something with lighter body in, say, the 4% ABV range. Guinness is my go-to for that reason even though I think it's just fine, not great. Deschutes Black Butte Porter is the best compromise I've found, but is rarely on tap where I live.

It's a lot easier to add lots of hops.

As another commenter here posted, I think a lot of people formed an identity to it. As the person who likes craft beer and ipas were the king of craft beer. Now I just find them too much.

Funny thing happened to me, my friend said he liked ipas so I would always get them for him, he always said I knew what he liked. Years later he told me he actually hated ipas but wanted to seem like he liked them and eventually did.

I personally love super-hoppy beers. In a weird way, it feels kind of similar to the way I love super-spicy food, or 90% dark chocolate, or black coffee. It's just a big "kick" that's fun in and of itself.

With all these things, the flavor balances are certainly important, but obviously an aspect of it is out of balance and that's the whole point, what I like about it.

So just, to each their own. I know plenty of people who despise hoppy beer. I'm just glad there's a proper full range of flavors at my local average supermarket. There wasn't before.

I personally love stouts and porters - yet there is a severe shortage of them. There was a 'whiskey/bourbon barrel aged RIS" craze short while ago, but it was all the same.. and they were available only in brewery pubs.

When i go to store the beer wall is full of IPAs, another one is full of lagers(I'll pass on them).. and maybe 2-3 types of stouts/sours/porters are mixed with IPAs.

Pretty much all of my favourite beers come from Latvia. I haven’t tasted much better than I did out there.

But I have to say that there are some Estonian breweries that are really world-class, especially Põhjala and Pühaste made some of my favorite beers ever.

This is exactly it. An IPA is much more forgiving to lackluster consistency of material inputs and process control making it a perfect match for small operators that don't have those things dialed in yet (or can't afford to dial them in)

After home brewing, I have never had a bad batch. I just use soap and water to clean. Maybe it’s the risk of losing 600 gallons instead of 6. Some of the lambics are exposed to open field air (the one with the monk on the front). Is the cleanliness overblown?

You are not alone.

A microbrewer here in London said it really well: most small breweries go with IPA and in general overdo their hops because it allows to hide faults. Without the overpowering hoppiness their beers wouldn't taste good at all.

As a casual home brewer, I try to avoid hoppy concoctions. And at some point I will learn how to do proper German style weissbier...

Heck, I live in a small rust belt town of 2,000 people and we even have a brewery dedicated to sours alone. Travel 20 minutes up the road to the next town over, with a population of not even 1,000 people, and you'll come across a major – as in their production capacity is pushing the limits of what can be reasonably considered craft – craft brewery. Although not necessarily always available, they have 35 beers in their catalog. I'm not sure any of them resemble the west coast-style IPA we're talking about. If you include hazy, milkshake, etc. takes on IPAs then 9 of the 35 are considered IPAs. Still not a lot of emphasis on IPAs in general.

As an aside, this "rural" craft beer industry is rather interesting. The primary business model seems to be set up production where operations is cheap and then ship the product into the city. That sour brewery is basically a tech company, selling the vast majority of their beer online. Although that major craft brewery I spoke of does put a lot of effort into beer tourism, attracting people to their facilities, as well.

There are a few pilsner/lager breweries but they have to be so much better at their styles and are still missing out on a large portion of the market.

Specialized sour breweries exist and do somewhat well, but the market is limited and the product takes years to age.

This sort of ultra high IBU IPA remains really popular and all over the shelf when I go to Seattle or Portland.

This style of beer used to be popular in Vancouver, BC a few years ago too, but at this point the local craft brew scene has largely moved on from bitter west coast style hoppy IPAs, to the point now that when someone makes one its a bit of a novelty.

https://vinepair.com/booze-news/if-you-are-a-fan-of-ipa-scie...

After drinking hoppy beers for a while, your brain associates the pleasure from the sugar and alcohol with the taste of the hops. You think you like the hops, but you really just like the sugar and alcohol. Without the hops though, the beer would be unpalatable.