I dont understand: distaste for hops

I could see the extreme DIPA's and TRIPA's being a fad but even that is a weak speculation.

 

I wouldn't like to see this, per say, but I anticipate barrel-aged everything, once they start lowering prices to consumer levels.

And for what it's worth, to answer the OP's question, I'd say the reason people might not like hops is because of the flavor...duh! When it comes down to it, hops are bitter, dank, citrusy-sour, and have a very unique flavor. If some people don't like beer with a tractor full of one ingredient piled in and prefer some balance, or else other flavors, well that shouldn't be too confusing, should it?

I only began trusting IPAs after years of loving stouts, Belgian quads, lagers, and disliking every hoppy beer I'd tried to that point (Sierra Nevada, 2-Hearted). It was only when I found the right one, Green Flash's IPA in particular, and Lagunitas too, that I discovered that there were variants on the style that didn't gross me out and allowed me to develop a more open-palate.

 

Because not every dump you takes needs to be thee epic one. Sometimes, you just want do a little quiet reading while dropping the kids off at the pool, and not burst a blood vessel.

 

But there are no rules in beer. You can do whatever you want. There is no specific formula for making a pale ale or an ipa, or anything else really. There are general guidelines.

Now, is it helpful to consumers if somebody brews a hoppy, light lager and calls it a stout? No. And nobody does. Nor (as the example provided in this thread) does anybody call a pale hoppy beer a dopplebock. What we see instead is minor extensions to the definition. Dogfish Piercing Pils most closely resembles a pilsner of all the styles, even if it adds Cascade to the SaaZ hops and a little pear juice to balance the bitterness of the SaaZ hops.

Perfect attention to some antiquated style recipe is boring and would kill craft beer. Making massive deviations rendering the beer utter unrecognizable as being in its stated style is obnoxious and detrimental to consumers. In my many years drinking beer, I can't recall a single example of a beer that was that far removed from its identified style. Ironically, the closest would be "IPAs" that were really just mild pale ales.

 

And unfortunately, to some subset of consumers, adding more hop character to styles not known for it does precisely that.

 

Taking the focus off of hops for a second, on to what constitutes a minor deviation from style versus a significant deviation, let's look at an actual rather than hypothetical doppelbock example.

Aecht Schlenkerla makes rauchbiers, and it's fairy well agreed upon by most rauchbier drinkers that theirs are world-class and style-defining. Their naming scheme adds extra style descriptors to differentiate their beers from each other, like marzen, helles, and so forth. One of their beers, the Eiche, is labeled as a doppelbock. It is not labeled as a rauchbier, because while it still uses smoked malt, that malt was smoked with oak instead of beech. Hence, here and other places, it is labeled as a doppelbock, despite it having the somewhat polarizing flavor of a rauchbier.

It could be argued, especially by those who are not smoke beer / rauchbier fans, that adding a large dose of smoked malt to something called a doppelbock is far more significant a difference than switching from one type of wood to another in a smoke beer. Under that argument, the alleged doppelbock would be better referred to as a rauchbier, or at least should have some other term appended before or after "doppelbock" to indicate that one should not expect a typical doppelbock experience. Other people, generally those who love rauchbiers, tend to see absolutely no issue with the Eiche being called a doppelbock, and go with the argument that the brewer refers to it as a doppelbock, and that styles are not standardized.

So it goes with adding hops to other beer styles, and not mentioning that on the labeling. That just happens far more often.

 

Where are those examples? I know you have that low tolerance for hops, but there are some hops in all beers. In one of my examples, Peak Fresh Cut, they add some American Hops to SaaZ and do say on the label "A dry hopped Pilsner". That's fair warning in my view and the IBUs for the beer remain low.

I've had a few brown ales that were unusually hoppy, but they were always described as a hoppy brown ale on the label. Lagunitas Imperial Red likewise calls out the hoppy nature of this red ale.

 

Like Palo Santo Marron being called a brown ale

 

or perhaps
Bourbon Barrel Aged Imperial Pumpkin Peach Ale, dry hopped on brett.

But seriously sour beers are exploding right now.

 

Examples for me personally include most everything Sierra Nevada makes. Kellerweis kicked on my hop reaction. Vienna kicked on my hop reaction (meanwhile, Eliot Ness in the same style gets over a 4.8 rating from me). Oktoberfest kicked on my hop reaction. Tumbler did not, surprisingly - but Tumbler also recently got relegated to variety pack only, and replaced by Flipside in the seasonal rotation, with a lot of people saying it was boring. Widmer's hefeweizen is another one. A local brewery here, MadTree, released a gose that was hop-forward. There are also the examples like Carson's Brown Cow, which is a brown ale - and while hoppy beers do fit under the brown ale descriptor, literally every single thing written about that beer by the brewery talked only about the seven different kinds of malt in it. None of which I could taste.

Being hop sensitive but enjoying good non-hoppy beer is not a great place to be in, at least these days.