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Comment by DigitalJack | Hacker News Reader

Craft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer.

Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.

Not just Portland, the entire American craft beer scene is infected with shitty, indistinguishable IPA's that all taste like a mountain of hops.

There are definitely a lot of bad IPA's, but that's hardly even a significant part of the American Craft Beer scene these days.

Googling "west coast beer style" has this[0] as the first result. You could argue that this isn't a canonical source or that things have changed since the thread in 2011--but the stigma is still around.

[0] https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic...

I would argue that the IPA fandom hasn't diminished (especially out west), but other things have arisen alongside it.

On the east coast, I see an impressive number of sours and dubbels coming out of craft shops, and the midwest is big on bold, malty offerings like ambers and oatmeal stouts.

I haven't seen IPAs drop in popularity (I much prefer darker, maltier beers), but I do feel like more recently IPAs have tried to use hops in more interesting ways instead of just going for XIPA/DIPA. I hope if hops stay around this trend continues.

I would have thought the hops shortage of 2008 would have forced breweries to try something else, so by now it's probably demand driven. I hear there's a new hops shortage coming up.

Yeah, I don't know that I've seen an actual drop, but there definitely seems to be more development in other areas. Craft beer aisles keep growing, and a good chunk of what gets added isn't IPAs. Still not enough porters and dark ales for my taste, but I'll take what I can get.

I'm definitely glad to see the push into more interesting IPAs. I'm seeing more whites, doubles, and other exotic stuff. Plus people finally seem to be learning that 80 IBUs demands some malt and complexity to make something drinkable.

(For some reason, the Wyoming/Idaho region is awesome for dark beers. Something practical, or just a regional fascination? Try some Wake Up Call or 3 Picket Porter if you can find 'em.)

I keep on thinking that surely this hops fad will die out soon, but it keeps on increasing. The West coast is especially big on hops. Even lagers from breweries like Lagunitas are extremely hoppy. No thank you. Hops are a cheap and easy way to disguise the taste of bad beer.

It's insane. I'd honestly rather have a Miller or something than Yet Another IPA.

I'll drink a miller just to troll the insufferable yuppie dbags that hate that shit

Hey, it's the champagne of beers.

I think its mostly a west coast thing - here in the midwest we get plenty of malty beers!

I feel like American beer is bizarrely segmented. The West Coast (from Colorado on, roughly) is still fixated on IPAs and hoppiness. The midwest is full of great ambers and other malty things, and the east has taken to both sours and darker ales like dubbels.

The non-coastal west I struggle to characterize, but it's putting out a lot of truly awesome beer, including really dark stuff like porters and imperials that I love.

I think people are on a quest to make the perfect IPA.. And make money in the process. For me it's IPA or nothing.

Sierra Nevada (which makes some decent beers!) deserves a lot of blame for this nonsense.

They've been chasing the dragon more than anyone else, putting out stuff like Hop Hunter which is defined exclusively by how strong they can make it. "Beer with added hop oil"? Really? If brewing with more hops isn't enough, it's probably time to stop adding hops and improve the beer some other way!

Cascade hops are a great flavor, I love them, but they need to go together with the other tastes.

I stopped drinking IPA's for that reason. I wont try one unless it's recommended by somebody I know has taste. Too much wasted cash...

The reason IPA is so popular is because for so long the american beer landscape was dominated by brews like Budwiser that are quite weakly flavored. This was an artifact of prohibition destroying most of the competitive landscape with the survivors dominating the market for decades and in turn using anticompetitive laws to their advantage.

IPA is a reaction against that flavor profile. You'll be starting to see new flavors come about as people (like yourself) become tired of IPAs.

Why not flavor with malts? I haven't looked into the history of American beer, but many styles seem to come from the price of local ingredients and qualities of local water. That makes me things hops were cheap and plentiful and caused the IPA trend.

I'm not a super expert, this is just what my friends in the biz have told me. I wouldn't be surprised if several factors conspired to create the IPA trend. Yes, there are many ways to infuse flavor into beer, some of which you mentioned above. My friends make IPA styles, but also many others using all kinds of tricks like malts, waters with different minerals, pHs, different base ingredients, brewing wheat in different ways. My buddy even domesticated a new strain of yeast.

If you're in Boston, give Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville a try (https://goo.gl/maps/bm22XaBvFPQ2). I have something of an interest of it, but I (unsurprisingly) recommend them.

Aeronaut is a great option for some new flavors. They do all-out hoppy IPAs, but if that's not your thing the other options are distinctive and tasty.

I have wondered about the same thing--both hoppiness and maltiness are good reactions against bland mass market beers, but somehow big malts never took off the way hoppy IPAs did. Is it difficult/expensive to make malty beers?

Hoppiness is partly a reaction to the variance in hops and a pride in "American beer". Cascade hops in particular are cheap, available, and have a strong and distinctive flavor; hence the popularity of IPAs on the west coast, and the presence of companies like Sierra Nevada in the hoppy vanguard.

Even as the Cascade trend has diminished, lots of people have 'reacted' by rediscovering other hop flavors and advertising things like Nobel hopped beers.

Having said that, it's all getting a bit played out (except on the west coast, perhaps) and I'm starting to see more experimentation with other stylings like wheat, fruit tones, and dark ales.

On that note, why are there so many new IPAs in PNW? I like IPAs, but I doubt most people want them.

On the contrary, that's why so many are made.

My theory: they taste like pine trees, and we've got a lot of pine trees, so it just feels right. Try drinking an IPA in Mexico sometimes. Super inappropes. But in PNW it makes sense. For awhile, til you get sick of it.

Pine trees smell good. They do not taste good.

We've got a lot of pinetrees in michigan as well, but we generally dont have these super hoppy styles.

I think theres also regional hop variations, so maybe theyre just less piney here.

Cascade hops are super strong, and are grown out in the PNW/Colorado area, so that's a big chunk of the problem. Other hop varieties lend themselves much better to malty beers, or to darker options where the bitterness is more subtle.

Pine trees are even on the flag for New England.

Here's an idea for a craft brew. Replace the hops with actual white pine needles.

And Googling for "beer with pine needles"...

...dammit. "Spruce beer". That idea is literally centuries old. At least five breweries currently use evergreen bits as flavoring agents, and at least 16 have tried reviving gruit recipes in some form or another. Apparently, Sitka spruce tips are popular in Alaska, being far more available than hops.

Yeah, the Alaskan Winter ale with spruce tips is good. Not as good as their Alaskan Amber alt beer. (Though, it's a bit variable, sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's the nectar of the gods.)

(Personally, I wasn't a fan of IPAs before they got big, but preferred the amber -> porter/stout range)

Don't know about PNW (Pacific Northwest??), but at least over here (northern Europe) IPAs are terribly trendy, you can find them in every grocery store. I suppose it's some worldwide trend..

80% of hops in America come from the Yakima Valley, which is in Eastern Washington. They even have a large hop festival every year. I think this presence influences the beer scene dramatically.

The same reason there are so many JS frameworks.

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