Top Rated New England IPA

The hops used. Can you detect the difference in Simcoe and Citra? Galaxy and Mosaic?

What if they called it double dry hopped and then mixed the hops?

 

The beers do taste different for the reasons the above poster mentioned, but damn if they aren't overrated to hell at this point, nearly as overrated as heady.

With that said, there's still very much a "tastes like a Tree House beer" profile that they mostly all have in common, just like there's, "tastes like an OH beer," or "tastes like a Monkish beer," or "tastes like an Equilibrium beer," etc...

Rant time, I think the worst rag on NEIPA is that they're all ugly, mostly indistinguishable juice bombs. Ignoring hops, even between yeast, body, water chemistry, etc, most producers have very different profiles they go for and it's apparent in the beer.

 

If you can't tell the difference between different hops in IPA's, are you really even trying to haze bro?

 

@RobNewton
How exactly is Heady overrated? It’s been around long enough to not be a fad. It’s taste is more timeless than a NEIPA. It’s less than 12 dollars for a 4 pack.... what more do you want...
It’s a great beer at a fair price point. It’s not hard to get... there is no line. You can go to the Stowe brewery and walk out with a case no problem.

 

Just want to point out that a rating given by people judging their own experiences with a beer cannot, by definition, be over rated. Nor under rated. It is merely rated. You can agree with it or disagree with it based on experience, but the idea that ratings can be over or under rated is ridiculous.

To me Wrench from Industrial Arts hits just the right amount of bitterness, sweetness, body, viscosity, malt flavors, alcohol presence, and soft mouthfeel that I like in a NEIPA. It's my present favorite, and on this my tenth day of dry out I REALLY wish I had one right now.

 

You chose to dry out during the holiday season?

Seems overrated to me.

 

I have had my share of a few dozen Tree House beers, and yes, they are all quite similar.

They all have a distinguishable Tree House note, and while they do mix up the hops and such, the flavor doesn't change that drastically. Their yeast profile dominates.

If you did a lineup of TH beers blind, by the 2nd or 3rd beer you swear you were having the same beer over and over again. In fact, we did this and that was exactly my thought... Another time, we probably had a dozen different, fresh TH beers and by the 5th can we decided to abort the tasting and move on to other beers because it was just so repetitive.

Even when I had King Julius (#5 on the top 250), I kind of thought to myself... "This is it?". It just tasted like a slightly more sweeter Julius, which is great and all, but it tasted basically the same. Good beers, no doubt, but they don't vary much.

 

Ratings won't tell you about the perceivable differences between highly rated beers. For that someone needs to run a Triangle test, two beers at a time, i.e., blind tasting of two beers using two portions of one and and a single portion of either with the person selecting the one that is different, etc. Then repeat with every possible combination of beers. (Nobody is going to pay to do all that. )

So think of what as going on as the creation of an equivalence class of beers that have pretty much identical scores but which may have subtle differences that may make a difference to one person or another, but all the beers within the group are pretty much identical. So which you enjoy the most is based on your preferences but objectively speaking none of they is superior to other, just different.

 

Couldn't have said it better myself. 100% in agreement.

 

Highest rated hefeweizens on earth.

 

It is pretty much like any dominant brewer for a particular style: you know Cantillon and 3F are going to dominate the lambics list, yet all their beers taste the same to me.

And much of these lists are dominated as much by hype and acceptance by the masses that "X" makes the best "Y" style of beer. So Tree House releasing a new NEIPA has more weight than Joe's Average Brewery (I'm copyrighting that) putting one into the ether.

To be fair, Tree House is at around 50 of their Curiosity "one off" beers they have been releasing since 2012/2013. I've seen much worse offenders with the amount of rotating hop beers and putting out R&D cans to their customers in lieu of just branding a beer you can stand behind. All these one offs cloud the best of lists more than anything...

 

......zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

 

I have only consumed one beer from Tree House so I can’t personally comment as to the question of “Is there really a perceivable difference here?”

There has been a fair bit of discussion about hops but another factor that influences a beer’s flavor profile is qualities from the fermentation aspect. I am assuming that Tree House is using their house yeast to ferment these ‘NEIPA’ beers and are also conducting the same process (e.g., fermentation temperature profile,…) while producing these ‘NEIPA” beers. This will produce a ‘sameness’ to these beers.

Cheers!

@chipawayboy