American Beers = Overly Hopped

NO. Thats what makes American beers stand out.

 

It's less the amount of hoppy beer being made in the US that's the issue, and more the amount of hopped-up beers in styles which do not evoke "hoppy" as a descriptor. I'll use hefeweizen as an example - the flavor in a hefe should be the yeast, the esters. Banana, clove, light fruits, coriander. Many, I would daresay most, of the hefeweizens labeled as such from US breweries are instead a smack in the mouth of hops. Kellerweis, Widmers, Schlafly, all effectively pale ales with wheat. At least Boulevard is polite enough to label 80 Acre as a hoppy wheat beer, rather than slapping a "hefeweizen" label on it.

Factor in that the hop aficionados vastly outnumber the folks like me (whee, supertaster for bitter) in the craft beer market, quite possibly as a sort of feedback loop where IPAs are seen as the definition of craft beer to most people who are outside looking in, and those hopped-up beers then get lauded and praised for being amazing exemplars of the style they're labeled as (but never with any notes mentioning how hoppy they are) - and thus, rating sites aren't helpful tools for the non-hop-aficionado to weed out the hopped-up versions. Trying new beers from US breweries then tends to be like trying to pet a cat's belly.

Imagine, if you will, that you really like gourmet pizza - not that "tomato sauce smeared on cardboard" crap from the big chains - but there's a chunk of the gourmet pizza world that involves fish paste as the sauce. You're not a fan of the fish paste pizza - the smell repulses you, and any time you try to taste a fish paste pizza, the only thing you can taste at all is a potent wall of rancid fish. Now imagine that a huge number of gourmet pizza people LOVE fish paste pizza. Can't get enough of it. Keep talking endlessly about new varieties and combinations of fish paste, like where red snapper just got cross-bred with rainbow trout to make the fishiest fish paste ever, and there's a new subspecies of tilapia that really concentrates tropical fishiness instead of the old pine-forest fishiness from salmon. Imagine that every gourmet pizza place anywhere around you started dropping any pizza that didn't involve fish paste, and every started mixing fish paste in with their other sauces. New pizza places advertise things like "traditional pepperoni cheese pizza", and you check some reviews and see only that it's the most spectacular pepperoni cheese pizza anyone has ever tried - and when you order one and it arrives at your table, there's a veritable miasma of fish paste haze swirling over it, daring you to even try to take a bite. Imagine that everyone else around doesn't understand at all that the pizza is too fishy, or even fishy at all, and says things like "well, there isn't much fish in there, I can't even taste any. I'm sure there's plenty of non-fishy pizza out there for you, though." Imagine that any place that used to carry some amazing gourmet pizza from overseas, where they have seemingly never even heard of fish paste, has reduced its imported inventory, and it's tougher to find even old standbys. Might you, perhaps, complain about this somewhere?

TL;DR - You don't see any issue because you enjoy hops to the extent that you probably don't even register their presence in a lot of beers that aren't bombastic hop explosions, but there's a percentage of us that are either getting tired of high hop levels being introduced to every beer style, or who literally physically cannot ever even learn to enjoy it and really don't like the surprise factor of drinking a "gose" and getting a mouthful of flowery perfume (this has already happened to me). Meanwhile, tried and true options that we already know we like can be found in fewer places, and we can actually watch beers we loved get discontinued and replaced with more hoppy beer. We're going to complain. You're going to disagree.

 

You lost me at Kellerweis. Maybe I need to revisit; always found that true to style?

 

Literally all I get out of that one is floral perfume - it's 80 Acre to me. But, as explained, supertaster for bitter.

 

The only person that can say a beer is "overly hopped" is the brewer, because it's HIS recipe. If he wants to make a beer with a shitload of hops, that's his call.

 

As much as I love amazing APA/IPA/DIPA's, I equally appreciate styles with hops only used as a (slight) bittering addition... I find myself becoming more and more excited by other styles now, as they are becoming far more special than another great IPA... I can get those anytime... It is not as easy to find an amazing cream ale, lager, sweet stout and other low-hopped beers at many breweries.