Tree House NEIPA Dominance

I guess it would be interesting to see what would happen if it were more widely distributed. Get to to point where one could walk into any bottle shop within, say, miles of the brewery and find some TH NEIPAs in the cooler. Then we would see how special it really is.

 

I thought I saw in one of these posts that they were expanding operations. They sell what they brew very easily, and once you have it dialed in they control the volume released and the price. It’s not much of a trick to leave them wanting more. The brewing world is full of cautionary tales of the nightmares of increasing the volume and expanding your footprint. NoDa here is a prime example after winning a Gold Medal at the GABF, that was a great beer and they rightfully wanted to increase production and went to a centrifuge. They completely lost it, the following batches were just terrible. Never did get it back, but it’s touched Burial with Scythe, and Alpine moving to Va, and I’m sure there’s others. So your point is valid about shelf availability and increasing your area.

 

Yep, trading and the "gray" market.

 

Dale, the way I am reading this is you are of the opinion that the change to the flavor profile of NoDa beers (e.g., Hop, Drop and Roll) is due to installing and using a centrifuge. Is this just a thought that you have or is there documentation here?

Cheers!

 

Hmm, no comments from a beer distributor in Charlotte. Tasting is believing, I traded this easily can for can when a Heady was the most popular beer available. The new formulation wasn’t just off but the beer was actually bad, and it was consistently so. No idea how to qualify that, but my drinking pre and post expansion matched what I was hearing around town

 

There's a pretty distinct difference between the beers that Alchemist and MBC brew that are listed as "New England IPA" and beers that Tree House and Trillium and Other Half brew, IMHO. One's not better than the other, but the difference is striking, IMHO, in appearance, flavor, and mouthfeel.

 

This site rather embarrassingly has retconned a lot of non-NEIPAs into the "New England IPA" style. As has been discussed in other threads, for instance, Toppling Goliath never has brewed a New England IPA, and to label some of its most prominent beers as NEIPAs displays both ignorance and superficiality. I agree that Heady Topper and the other classic Vermont IPAs don't belong in the NEIPA category either, as they hew much closer to the unfiltered WCIPAs that begat them than to the unbitter sugarmurk that they unfortunately inspired and that has become the modern NEIPA hallmark.

 

Dale, I will take your word that the beers of NoDa have changed (for the worse in your opinion). Is the root cause of this change in the flavor profile due to the implementation of a centrifuge? Or could it be other changes in the brewing process?

Cheers!

 

Given the consistency before they expanded production I’d say going to a centrifuge was the primary culprit. It was about the time there was a reported shortage on Citra hops too , could be they reformulated a bit, but that’s an idle and thought. They used a 5 hop combo very similar to Heady. You would figure if you brew it once you should be able to repeat that, even if it takes some time to dial it back in.

 

Pseudo Sue and King Sue look and taste distinctively different than they did when i acquired them in bomber format at the “old” brewery 5 years ago and 3 years ago respectively, IMHO. WAAAAAY more hazy now, with significantly less bitterness and a softer mouthfeel.

 

I view the whole NEIPA thing as a 5 state circle jerk!!

 

We can debate all day about what other IPA makers are in the class of Tree House, but where Tree House really stands out from the crowd is how unbelievable their sub-8% milk/sweet stouts are crafted. Is anyone on the planet pulling this style & ABV off at this level of excellence? IMO they are currently the solo brewer in tier 1 at the top. Everyone else needs to boost the ABV above 10% to get that same richness and sweetness.

 

That’s gonna be a no from me dawg.

 

I don’t buy it either, if it wasn’t “that good” it certainly would show up on the trading site first. It just wouldn’t command what it does, you’d see comments on trading threads, and by now it would have been outed.

 

Let me be clear. The Tree House beers I have drank range from good to great. Taking up 50% of the top rated beers is absurd.

 

As was pointed out by Todd, that is mostly due to trading of the beer to a very large audience. Has nothing to do with the actual quality of the beer. The beer would be just as good and not take up so much of the top 50 if trading didn’t exist.

 

Oh I read his post as saying the high number of ratings is due to trading. Not the high scores of rating because of trading.

 

Is it possible to split the scores between the locals, and out of area buyers? Out of area could be trading, or it might be a beer run, but I would be interested to see how any beer scores. If it’s heavily slanted towards local buyers I might suspect they’re bumping it to increase trade value. It’s that easy. But if out of area as are scoring it that high I’d tend to believe the scoring is very fair.

 

Couldn't out of the area buyers be subject to that famous hype/effort bias though? It's ultimately really hard to figure out the role of non sensory inputs in ratings of any consumables. Context plays a huge role but how huge is hard to say