Tree House NEIPA Dominance

Cool. It goes to show that they are good/great but not necessarily the best. I would also agree that pales aren't their thing. It's funny that Bright (with Citra?) was the DIPA for TH considering it is the one that uses a traditional American yeast vs the house yeast.

Just skimming through the list, two Virginia breweries whose hoppy beers I am quite fond of are right there with it, Benchtop and Triple Crossing. Benchtop does a lot of stuff with Kviek yeast that I find interesting too. TC just makes all around great hoppy beers and are one of the few localish breweries I get excited about since moving. I do think we're at the point where there is good stuff almost everywhere, though I've had local "bests" that are absolutely terrible.

I went to TH today and stopped at Armsby for lunch on the way. I had a Society & Solitude #8 (Mosaic, Citra, Simcoe). Hill is still the king and it's not even close for me. I'm looking forward to these TH beers but I know none of them are going to top that.

 

I remember when people would kill other people for TG beers with all the hype their hoppy options had. Once they got into mass market they became just another solid beer. Let's get Treehouse out of their little bubble and see if availability kills their rating like every other beer that has been hyped and became easy to obtain.

 

*** Tree House

A big factor on the high ratings of beers from TH, or Heady back in the day, is that they never rotted on the shelf at a grocery store. Everyone drinking/rating them went way out of their way to get them, kept them cold, and drank asap. Usually the tanking that occurs when (big) scale ups occur is (1) totally different facility/ batch size... basically not even the same beer, the people who think they are funny giving King Sue 1-1-1-1-1, or last, you're legitimately getting a worse caused by being non-fresh.

Like the OP said, there's something a little fishy when one brewery can get 100 beers over 4.0 on BA. Not that the beers aren't good, but there's a plethora of biases that help scoot these ratings higher and higher.

 

Excellent post and advice, thanks a lot! I haven’t tried some of the brews you mentioned - Old Nation’s M-43 does hold a special place in my heart, though, as it was the first time I tried an IPA and actually enjoyed the hoppiness - it basically started me down the path of craft beer.

 

I think a big factor in this is that TH continues to release a bunch of differently named beers that are essentially the same. I know, know the malt bill is slightly different and the used a different combination of hops, but come on, they really are the same.

 

I hear Tired Hands uses the standing in line marketing methods as well.

 

Well regarding Toppling Goliath IPAs and actual New England IPAs, you wouldn't need an opaque glass, because they're both murky.

Also, in the Paste blind tastings I linked to earlier, Fire Skulls and Money was #37 on that list. You said the mouthfeel is different than New England IPAs with Toppling Goliath IPAs. Here's an excerpt from Paste's blind tasting for Fire, Skulls, and Money (bear in mind these are beer experts who conduct these too). They do however note the bitterness aspect you mention in Toppling Goliath IPAs.

"It should go without saying that the flavors are all massive---monolithic impressions of resin, grass, intense citrus, sweet onion/garlic and mango, each one bigger than the last. The texture, likewise, is extremely thick and chewy. In short, this is exactly the sort of IPA that is currently dominating the highest ratings sites such as Untappd, and much of that is due to bombast."

Again we'll have to agree to disagree here. I think West Coast IPAs are far different from Toppling Goliath IPAs. You can start with big differences in appearance, mouthfeel, and bitterness (not that there isn't bitterness in Toppling Goliath IPAs, but I wouldn't call them scathingly bitter like a West Coast IPA).

Do we really need MORE IPA categories? What else would you call IPAs that aren't New England IPAs?

There's English IPAs...but what else?

This is a great point. I would note Hill Farmstead still has very high ratings for their IPAs. And they don't distribute outside from a few select draft accounts. Distribution can do nothing but hurt a breweries' ratings for IPAs.

 

Seems to me HF is in a very desirable spot, they brew what they want in the volume they want, and they distribute to who they want. Most people come to them, and that’s no mean feat given how remote they are. They couldn’t distribute if they wanted to without changing a part of their success formula. I admire them for sticking to their dream, and part of that dream is not supplying all of VT with beer.

 

Good points. There was a recent Michael Tonsmeire blog post about how breweries can drive high ratings that mentions this - he also points out that even if you assume that people are rating scrupulously fairly without being influenced by hype or price, highly sought-after or limited releases will tend to pick up higher ratings because they won't get their average pulled down by a few people who basically don't like the style: relatively few people will queue up for hours or trade a kidney for a beer if they know they don't get on with the brewery or the style, whereas they might try it if they come across it in a bar or bottle shop.

 

I mean I was perfectly fine with a broad American IPA category with West Coast and New England IPAs being the most popular subcategories that still didn't totally exhaust it. Calling all non-NEIPAs West Coast by default seems akin to saying all non-German pilsners should automatically be called Czech. It also seems pretty anachronistic to me as there were other IPA traditions like the ones @islay mentioned that coexisted and in some ways were in conversation with the west coast tradition.

I should be clear that I don't think we need to rigorously pin down the parameters of an east coast IPA or a midwest IPA or even deploy them as categories with any regularity to nevertheless recognize the difficulties with calling them all west coast IPAs by default.

 

This is a great point. There's a huge selection bias at work here such that the people who rate Tree House beers disproportionately are the people who really, really like Tree House beers. The people who would shrug at them rarely bother to go through the trouble to obtain them in the first place. If you normalize for all of the factors that have been mentioned, Tree House wouldn't look nearly as dominant (or dominant at all). Anybody who hasn't had much beer from Tree House but dreams of the day when he gets the chance should keep that in mind (i.e., it's not nearly as special as it has been built up to be).

I would never describe a typical NEIPA mouthfeel as "chewy," but then again Toppling Goliath never has produced an NEIPA. Similarly, resin, grain, onion, and garlic are rare descriptors in NEIPAs, except perhaps among people who drink them almost exclusively and rarely have experienced those hops flavors in non-New-England IPAs that feature them more strongly. I will grant that Fire, Skulls, & Money probably is the juiciest IPA Toppling Goliath makes and the one that panders most to contemporary palates.

It seems that a lot of people don't realize that NEIPAs are an evolution of WCIPAs. They didn't just suddenly emerge from the ether on a cool New England autumn day. I know they've morphed so much that it can be hard to tell, and many WCIPA fans disdain the NEIPA bastardization, but the history of the NEIPA substyle is inextricably linked to the WCIPA. Toppling Goliath IPAs and Vermont IPAs, with their proper attenuation and unmistakable if not overwhelming bitterness, are much closer descendants of WCIPAs than are the bitterless zuckerbiers that represent the modern NEIPA ideal.

I don't want more IPA categories in terms of styles. I opposed the creation of a New England IPA style at BeerAdvocate for the very reason that it was clear that people around here don't know what an NEIPA is and isn't. WCIPAs, ECIPAs, MWIPAs, and NEIPAs are all distinct informal substyles of American IPAs, the first three with multi-decade histories, although things can get blurry at the margins. VIPAs land somewhere in between WCIPAs and NEIPAs, and I tend to say closer to the former even if many associate them more with the latter (mainly based on "haze," which, again, long has been present in a minority of WCIPAs, and geographical proximity). Toppling Goliath IPAs are something of a parallel evolution to VIPAs.

 

The hype, brewery-only limitedness and stuff that people have said is true. If you look specifically at what is special about their beer amongst the NEIPA market, you get answers, too. I've given TH IPAs to many people who "don't like IPAs" or even beer and they usually say "this is amazing" or "the best beer I've ever had." The mouthfeel and yeast profile of all TH beer is very unique. Anecdotal analysis I've read says their blend of yeast has strains similar to German wheat beer yeast: perhaps bringing in wheat beer lovers who "hate hops." The feel is similar to the haziest hefeweizens, yet fluffy enough to float on your tongue. So, it seems TH may even bring in fans who aren't necessarily informed beer nerds. They don't know that if you look a little harder, you can find similar beer at local stores. I've talked to people in line at TH who clearly know nothing about beer or any other breweries and think TH is the only beer that they like.

 

2014 Toppling Goliath see through hops > 2019 Toppling Goliath hazy hops. Old school DDH Psuedo Sue in a bomber was perfection.

 

Yes, a lot of NEIPA fans are younger and less experienced craft beer drinkers who, out of youthful exuberance and changing cultural practices (think of the modern practice of issuing 5-star Uber driver ratings by default), have a tendency to give inordinately high ratings. In a very similar phenomenon, over at RateBeer, a large group of enthusiastic young Polish people has joined the site in the last couple of years, and certain apparently sweet Polish beers are receiving extraordinarily high ratings as a result.

Another way to look at this phenomenon is that NEIPAs, especially those produced by Tree House, are extraordinarily accessible and thus broaden the appeal of craft beer and IPAs in particular to a large group of people who otherwise can't stand the stuff. You can decide for yourself whether "IPAs for people who hate IPAs" is a compliment or an insult to Tree House and the NEIPA substyle.

 

Actually, some of the people I was referencing are older and simply don't know there is a lot of other beer everywhere now that would appeal to them. Those folks are less likely to rate beer on the internet, though.

Accessibility is their big thing for sure. Hopefully, it will be like a gateway drug to other hoppy beers. Many millennials/genXers were turned off to hops by the west coast style and IBU-arms race of the previous decade and believed those beers defined IPA. The people who "hate IPAs" most likely hate 100+ IBU west coast IPAs. So, I don't think drawing in formerly non-IPA people is disparaging to the brewery. Those people just hadn't had a hop-forward beer they liked. I'm glad brewers continue to find new ways of presenting this glorious plant in beer and creating more hop lovers.

 

You may want to let TG know that, because they seem proud at being a forebearer of the style:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We created that beer to remind everyone how we started! Thick, juicy and hazy before it was a “style”. <a href="https://t.co/amIAkNBXWV">https://t.co/amIAkNBXWV</a></p>&mdash; Toppling Goliath (@TGBrews) <a href="">November 21, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

I think the best "neipa" is made in Louisiana. The ghost.

 

Well we could split German Pilsners into Northern and Southern, but we don't, nor do I think we need to. But I agree, it is a good analogy, but for the purpose of limiting the number of styles, I think this is fine. German and Czech, done. Although I'd say German Pilsners and Czech Pale Lagers, since they don't call them Pilsners there.

It's actually a kind of funny example to use though, seeing as there's far less difference between German Pilsners and Czech Pale Lagers than West Coast IPAs and New England IPAs in my opinion.

I can agree with this, good point.

Sure, I can agree with most of this.

This is also well put, and this is how I would describe some Vermont IPAs like Heady and Sip of Sunshine. I still think most, if not all, Toppling Goliath IPAs I've had are closer to the New England style in my opinion, but we've already been down that road.

 

Another point in favor of Brewery release is that not only do they control distribution, but everything bought is dead fresh. You’d like to leave them wanting more, but not a lot more if it can be helped, it’s just lost revenue. Once your beers leave your control it’s in the Distributors or Retailers Hands, and these days that not always a safe way to protect your product and reputation. A few here mandate must be kept cold, you break that they pull their product. The problem with older beer sitting on the shelf is a brewery problem to the extreme, a guy buys an 8 months old warm Union Jack and decides the beer sucks, he may not know to check dates but the retailer thereafter sells shitty beer, and FW brews crap beer. It’s a huge problem, one that TH and TH don’t have to worry about, so I’d guess a part of NEIPAs popularity is that the beer is optimal when it’s bought.