New England style IPAs will continue to dominate in 2018

I have to disagree with this. Drop the IPA but call it NE CloudJoose or DDH CloudJoose and it will sell. I think the IPA name, while certainly a strong seller due to popularity of the style, has become less of the selling point compared to other monikers, marketing terms. Also if they look hazy and are described as juicy I don't think it matters what you call them.

 

With all due respect NEIPA's have been around for years. Trends have come and gone since the advent of hazy IPA's. Fruited IPA's and gose just to name two. At this point it is definitely not a stretch to say that NEIPA's are here to stay.

 

Sweet!

Cheers to you!!

 

Tide Pod pale ales. Duh.

 

The younger generations always make things their own.

 

So, with other styles, unlike NEIPA, brewers don't make any sub par examples, since they aren't looking to, nor able to, just "cash in" ? You're sticking with this?

 

Of course they do, but the topic is about NEIPAs, and my comment was relevant to the topic at hand.
Good beer,no matter the style, at $4-5 per can had better be on the same level of legitimately and widely accepted good beer.
I'm picking Heady as a widely accepted top beer here, If I were to give you half a dozen beers and you didn't like them, in fact thought two of the six were terrible, and then told you "Hey, they are doubles and Ne England IPAs, Just like that $4 can of Heady", Would you buy them? Just because the can said they had 8% ABV and were an IPA from New England?
To further illustrate cashing in on a label/style/ whatever, there are damn good Lagers from New England out there, I've yet to see one for $4...

If a handful of breweries set the bar high, why should every start up believe their attempt is worth what those top beers are worth?
It's the whole get a trophy for showing up thing.
Would you pay Filet mignon price for hamburger? It's from the same cow.

 

I think the idea that it costs a lot of money to make a NEIPA and why has been discussed here plenty, including by professional brewers who are members of this site. NEIPA isn't the most expensive nor cheapest style to buy, on average, BA Stouts and Wild Ales are more expensive, for instance, and as you point out simple lager styles often are less expensive, both to make and to buy.

I don't see more nor fewer bad examples of NEIPA out there than other styles, and I think brewers make as much money from every of their beers as the market will bear.

 

Point taken, and maybe I should put this differently.
I'm not a brewer, don't really know the first thing about brewing other than the layman's understanding of the ingredients and process. And I fully (civilly, mind you) disagree that there aren't sub par beers out there in the NEIPA style. I've had some pretty nasty ones, and others, including craft beer store owners agree. To the point where they won't carry those beers. Yet these breweries continue to crank out the product at a premium. I think it's a case where one should know their limitations, and regardless if you make beer or cupcakes, not wanting to turn out an inferior product. There is a reason you can walk into a big box hardware store and find twelve different drills at twelve different price points for example.

 

I'll start by saying that I don't want NEIPAs to die or go away completely. There are some really great ones out there that I have enjoyed. The 'style', when done well, is a unique and welcome example of the creativity and innovation that has fueled the American craft beer movement since its inception.

BUT, having said that, I do think the proliferation of NEIPAs has caused some problems. Their popularity has encouraged plenty of sub-par, flawed knock-off attempts from unskilled brewers looking to make a quick buck. This is nothing new. This has happened in the past in previous decades and with other beer styles. However, the thing I find troubling this time around is that the popularity of NEIPA has started to change the perception of what a good quality beer is in a negative way. Up to this point, a cloudy beer was indicative of a bad quality brew (with the exception of a handful of styles for which it is appropriate). There's a reason for that. Most of the time, a cloudy beer does indicate a flaw on the brewing process, and a beer that will taste less than ideal. That's why organizations like the BJCP judge beers based on their appearance (and part of the reason why a hazy IPA will probably never win a GABF medal). The popularity of NEIPAs has changed that perception. Beer geeks have now begun to associate cloudiness with quality. Fledgling beer geeks and beer snobs see all the ratings charts dominated by NEIPA styles and assume that these are the gold standards for beer. In their minds, a good IPA should be tropical, juicy, and cloudy with low bitterness. If they come across an IPA that doesn't meet these standards it must be inferior. This fad also comes at a time when craft beer has become more mainstream than ever before, and when social media has had a bigger impact on the craft beer world than ever before.

It used to be that craft beer was more of a subculture, and you had to dig a little in order to learn and educate yourself. And education was a huge part of the rhetoric. Now, as more and more people jump in casually, they aren't seeking education in the same way. Rather, they are taking their cues from what they see on Untappd and from the NEIPAs they see in pics posted by their friends while scrolling through social media. Often, these pictures are nothing more than a prestige symbol of sorts, or an empty brag that the drinker waited in line for a rare NEIPA and earned their imaginary "beer geek badge." Nevertheless, many craft neophytes now look to the preferences of these friends, which are often formed more on the basis of hype and rarity, and allow them to shape their own. Things snowball from there and the popularity of the style grows.

As a result, we now have brewers purposefully releasing unfinished beer or, God forbid, dumping things like flour into their beer to purposefully alter the appearance in an attempt to pander to the cloudy beer market. Shockingly, it has been working. There are some quite obviously flawed beers out there that are being praised and highly rated, due mainly to their appearance and the ignorance of the drinkers. Alternatively, I see more and more people turning their nose up at non cloudy beer and even refusing to try it at samplings for the express reason that it isn't cloudy. Is the style to blame for this? No, not really. But the trouble is that people aren't calling out the flawed beer like they used to, and the impetus for education within the industry seems to be waning in favor of pandering to the market and grabbing the money. There's a big difference between a well made beer that happens to be hazy and the unfinished messes some breweries are releasing. I think we all need to take a step back and look at things from above the hype and drink more critically again, call out the flawed products when we come across them (in a polite and proactive way), and get back to the education and quality discussions that have propelled the craft beer movement up to this point.

 

It is all about the hops. You can brew a great NEIPA or regular IPA with a great batch of hops. The limiting factor is always the batch size of great hops.

 

1) Because they resent that NE IPAs are so appealing to new beer drinkers for non-beer-like qualities, or:

2) It's fun to be counter-cultural and hate on what's popular.

The only criticism of many NE IPAs that I feel is legitimate is that many of them are poorly made products churned out quickly to appease the masses/make a quick sale, but such is the case when any new product becomes extremely popular.

 

You think goses are just a trend? I'm seeing more breweries making more of them every year.

 

Might I offer a guess that they can't get them?

 

Great post all around. I've had many similar thoughts (albeit much more fragmented ) but you articulated it much better than I could have. I think your 3rd paragraph regarding how newer folks seem to get introduced into craft beer these days is particularly well stated. Cheers.

 

Wow what a lot of assumptions! I disagree with many of them. In fact, I see many of them as convenient and bogus rationalizations in the way other prejudices are given bogus rationalizations.

Yeah, we lovers of NEIPA are clueless folks who are out of touch with our taste buds and drink with our eyes only. We see haze in a beer and of course that beer is gonna be good, because the haze is what we like, and our palates are stupid and unrefined, not like those of the folks who point these things out to us. And we are stupid most of us, and mindless followers of trends.

And if I were to point out, say, that likely I was drinking and brewing fine beer before most of these NEIPA haters were born, and my unrefined palate has judged beer at competitions I likely will be pointed out to be the exception, it's the rest of the "hazebros", as some idiot haters call us, who are the blind followers drinking flawed beer out of stupidity.

 

I'll bite: I don't hate hazy IPA per se; when done right, it can be very good.

What I do hate is walking into a local craft spot and seeing 7 hazy ipas on draft, and one "regular" ipa. The rabid trend-chasing going on with hazy ipas is the problem, not the beer itself. Customers, brewers, and retailers are all guilty of this.

 

First, great post. I agree with this statement, but honestly, I find it difficult to call out "bad beers" publicly on a beer forum. I think in the last year or so some of these beers have been weeding themselves out through word of mouth, locally anyway.
It has gotten to the point, at least in Maine, that new beers sit on the shelves for weeks untouched. I think folks are realizing that they aren't going to shell out the cash for the next big thing every time it comes around because they have been burned before.
Social media sucks. Period. And that is what drives people to think they HAVE to have whatever their friends have, I'm sure it drives sales until people realize they are actually drinking stuff that isn't that good.

 

It seems NEIPAs are both an entry point into and an exit point out of the wonderful world of hoppy beers. We'll miss you, Dave!

 

Agreed OP - NEIPAs are good and hopefully they aren't going away!

The fad I'm not a fan of is everyone over here in Australia making Sour beers.

I don't mind Sour beers per-say (ones with flavour at least) but the Sour beers we seem to be getting are thin and one-dimensional and missing balance.

Bit of a side-track there, viva NEIPA!