Comment by hnbear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnbear | Hacker News Reader

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As a Brit who doesn't like IPAs the beer scene in the US is awful. There are thousands of small local breweries (amazing), all of which specialize in IPAs, with their key products being a double of triple IPA. The fancy brew pubs will have a dozen or two IPAs then offer Bud Light as the non-IPA option. I wish there was some better variety. Sours coming out over the last 5 or so years is a nice change, but I really wish people saw the options around Pilsner, Lager, cask ale, and other types.

I'm a snobby scotch drinker and agree with a little water.

I was actually taught to add a little water to scotch in multiple pretty knowledgeable Scottish whisky shops and distilleries. The snobbish behavior around neat drinking is just that. Especially cask strength bottlings which really need something to open it. Just a tiny dribble of water, but it helps.

Icing anything though tends to dull rather than enhance flavor, so that's not for me, but couldn't care less how you drink it.

That said, if you friends are just drinking expensive, but mediocre and dull highlands type whisky, the water won't add much. If you're drinking something like an Islay with a lot more depth to the flavor it helps more.

Ah that's not true about beer in the US at all. I also don't particularly like IPAs and have no problem at the local breweries.

I'll grant that there was a time when a lot of places were IPA heavy but they basically always had a few other styles.

Now every brewery around me is really varied. They might have a couple types of IPAs but all have another 6 or 10 + styles. A sour or two, such as a Belgian or American type. Often a berlinerweisse. Some brown/stout/porter types. Not just oatmeal stout. And even different lager types besides "lager". I see Helles and bock, Vienna, pilsner, everywhere. A rauchbier at one place.

I've never really had to look at the IPAs in years.

I think specializing in IPA is just the easy way to make something that seems gourmet and exotic, because you can start with a mediocre generic ale recipe and make an interesting lively drink by getting the hops recipe right. And there is so much variety of interesting hop flavors that once you start down that path, there's a lot of directions you can go with it, so there's a lot of room for variety within that genre.

From my limited experience making beer at home, it's much harder to make a mediocre simple brown ale than a mediocre simple IPA. Grain and mashing is harder to iterate on than hops. Apparently the experts make a yeast bread with their desired grain bill as a prototyping shortcut (compared to spending days or weeks brewing and fermenting a batch of ale), but I never got that far before I was diagnosed with celiac and had to give up the homebrewing dream.

I tend to think the American IPA fascination is an over-correction from too many decades fascination with pale lagers (the Budweiser/Bud Light dominance) and APAs.

I'm sorry you had bad luck finding the local craft breweries specializing in things other than IPAs, but they certainly exist in the US. I know that I appreciate how much Belgian influence happened in my city's craft brewing scene at a critical juncture. There are breweries here specializing in sours from years before it was a more national fad. Their only mistake not having a big enough distribution to get the most profit advantage from more recent trends or be that well known outside of the city.

Hear hear. Take all your damn IPAs and give me a Blonde, Stout, or Porter. For the latter two, the darker the better.

Damn yes. A lottery win fantasy of mine is to start a brewery and taproom that just does English (porters, stouts, reds, blondes, pales) and German (kölsch, bocks, hefeweizens (though these are by far my least favorite of the bunch), märzens, pilsners) style beers, because they’re impossible to find around here.

People have been drinking beer for thousands of years. There’s a lot of value in high-quality, classic styles.

> German ... pilsners

[Cries in Czech]

I jest of course :) The ležák beers that are most popular in Czech Republic (Pilsner Urquell in Bohemia; Radegast in Moravia/Silesia) are veeery nice, but they're probably not a huge departure from any good German beers, though there's some really fun smaller breweries doing cool stuff you may not see internationally. Great excuse to visit though :D

doh, I knew I was going to get some wrong, sorry

No, there's no need to apologise! That region is now a very strongly Czech-identifying one, but before the end of WW2[0] had a significant German minority who quite possibly bootstrapped the Pilsner style. So I don't think single modern-day nationality has a claim on its origin. It's maybe just interesting to know that "Pilsner" refers to a style of beer that originated in present-day Plzeň (a lovely wee city) but plenty of places can credibly claim to make "Pilsner" style beer, including Germany.

Apologies if it sounded like I was scolding, I didn't mean it that way at all :)

[0] - this is actually a fairly divisive issue to this day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czec...

You would find a steady customer in me.

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