IPA Overload

I wonder what our fathers and grandfathers (or some of the older BAs) were talking about back in the late 1970’s/early 80’s when AB had Bud Light, Busch Night and Natural Light options from the same brewery and then offered numerous full strength AALs as well which really aren’t much different just more calories.

 

Sly Fox released their Maibock yesterday as part of their Bock Fest celebration:



Prost!

 

There is still hope!

 

I think there was almost only drinking for intoxication then. Beer fit well, not too strong. And no 'annoying' taste.

 

That's a paddlin....

 

i recently heard a podcast with the owners of Bierstadt and while I have not had their beers I am already a fan. Loved their attitude and philosophy. The interviewer asked if it was a risk being a lager brewery when ipas are so popular. They said it’s a bigger risk being an ipa brewery in a sea of ipas. Talked about how hard it is stand out when 20 or 30 taps are ipas. Then if you do stand out how to keep that when new ipas or trends are always popping up. But ultimately they chose lagers because that’s what they love. Also makes sense why breweries are making so many “unique/wacky” styles or using ingredients. Trying to standout in a flooded market.

DDH everything and now cyro, lupomax etc hops. So breweries can add more hops and more hops into beers. It’s getting crazy.

 

I’m a little surprised to see this amount of sniping in a BA thread. It reaffirms my pride in never having a Facebook thing.

So I’ll throw my grain of sand on this mess by saying that if your local brewery / breweries aren’t giving the variety the you personally enjoy, go instead to your local bottle shop, pick your poison, put your elbows up at home, and continue searching what you want on Untappd.

IPAs do dominate the market cuz it’s what sells. Simple.

Someone here mentioned Southwest Florida. OK! I live in SW FL. We have great selections to navigate through. Like, for example, the Big Name down here, Fort Myers Brewing. Today their tap list looks like this:
8 IPAs, from Session to Imperial Black IPA.
Blonde Ale
Pilsner
ESB
Fruit Beer
Wheat Beer
Amber Ale
Irish Red
Pale Ale
Winter Warmer
Maibock
Belgian Brown Ale
Imperial Red Ale
Imperial Brown Ale
Barleywine
Dry Irish Stout
Peanut Butter Porter
Russian Imperial Stout
All brewed in house, no guest taps.

One of my favorite places is Palm City Brewing. They specialize in IPA and have their game down:
11 IPAs from 4.4 - 10% ABV, many hop varieties
Hefeweizen
Red Ale
Barleywine
Porter

My point is that Good Craft Beer is available everywhere; sometimes you have to turn over a rock or 2 to find whatcha want. I’ve never been in a tap room where I didn’t feel like I didn’t have options. I check tap lists before making the trip, never feel like I’m locked into IPA Hell.
Just like surfing, you keep searching for your big wave. It’s out there.,.

Sorry if I rambled.
Yes, I’m a Male from Florida.

 

A few thoughts:

• If you don't frequent breweries what may be on tap doesn't help much.
• IPAs have been dominating shelf space for a long time now, especially since there has been shifts within the style.
• But the double whammy here is that you see so many and most are pretty mediocre and/or way too similar.
• Are they still selling that well? Because there are so many choices and always new ones I see so many aging out on shelves, even the once sought after and popular ones.
• Seasonal releases are less exciting now that it's typically just another IPA, Troegs and SN as an example along with many others.
• In many stores my choices are now an IPA, a macro, or a beverage other than beer. And one of my local stores even stopped carrying Victory Prima Pils and Brooklyn Lager for example.

I have mixed feelings on this, as craft beer can be confusing enough for newcomers and this just muddies things further.

 

I intend on checking out breweries in Ft. Myers and Tampa, for now it's the Naples area. Cheers.

 

Arizona sounds awful

 

Don't forget phantasm powder.

 

I figured this would be a thread about a hoppy IPA called Overload. My mind naturally goes "hell yeah gimme some hop overload".

 

Are Tombstone Brewing beers available to you? I would recommend you try those beers.

Cheers!

 

And I wonder about this as regards IPAs on the Beer Retailers' shelves. How many IPA brands are really needed (or truly desired?) here? With so many old IPAs on my local Beer Retailers' shelves for me this alleged variety of choices is in reality a 'false choice'. When I am in the mood for purchasing a six-pack of IPA I have a mental list of brands in my head and I sometimes have to work my way 'through the list' before I find a brand that isn't many months old that I can buy (this is especially true at my local Total Wine store).

My other option to obtain fresh IPA is to brew my own (which I did four days ago).

Cheers!

 

I am pretty fortunate in my area. There are a variety of breweries available either thru distribution or visitation making a wide variety of styles. Even my beloved Allagash dropped an IPA lately that is more in the "traditional" vein than the modern interpretation - I found it quite tasty and enjoyable. Jack's Abby has their IPL lineup that rarely disappoints in addition to their other fine lagers. And there's no shortage of the weird and experimental either - never though I'd be drinking a fruited kettle sour puree type thing and liking it, but there ya go.

When I first joined BA, I really had no interest in and did not enjoy IPAs at all. OG Stone Ruination changed that, and while I'm still not a hophead I now understand and enjoy a well-made IPA variant. Looking over my list of styles consumed, wild ales and stouts dominate, but if you lump all the IPA subsets together they are a pretty close third, so they obviously make it into the rotation now and again. I do find the NEIPA to be repetitive.

I do look at what's on tap before visiting a brewery and if it's virtually all IPAs, we'll generally pass. My wife only likes a few of them, and since we visit breweries together it's an easy choice to skip an IPA-dominant tap room. We've walked out of Definitive when visiting Allagash and prefer hitting Foundation and even Austin Street, for instance. When Bissell Bros was on "the corner" it was a one and done for us - nothing they put out appealed to either of us and we never understood the hype. We do look for variety first and foremost. I've always felt - and maybe it is with no basis whatsoever - that a brewery should be able to produce some of the more traditional styles and that doing "old school" well is generally a good sign.

In stores - again, I am pretty lucky in that the "beer peeps" in the stores we support bring in other styles. Maybe not in huge amounts, but they seem to know a certain segment of their shoppers are looking for "other" amid the sea of similarity in the IPA/NEIPA offerings. As they have gotten to know us, they will point out for us what else is available beyond the typical and generally they are pretty chatty about their "finds". But they also know what puts the butter on their toast, so the IPA genre is certainly dominant and all but one of the stores have a BMC cooler. I completely agree that there are far too many IPA and especially NEIPA that all taste similar - so I think the statement about diving into the IPA pool being risky is probably an accurate comment. How do you differentiate yourself from the huge herd of decently made beers of similar style? I find that most of them are similar enough that I wouldn't care much which was in my glass, so unless one is absolutely loyal to the brewery itself or absolutely in love with a beer in particular, there's no real reason to seek out a particular brand.

TL/DR - in my area, it's pretty easy to avoid the style overload and not visit the places that offer limited styles. That's probably not so true in other areas.

 

THIS 100%!

 

Larry, I can provide one anecdotal example within the realm of Tired Hands: a month+ ago they had several of the same branded beer but with the differences being the number of dry hopping steps. In other words they had available Brand X, DDH X and TDH X and needless to say the TDH was priced the highest, then DDH and the cheapest (which was not really cheap) was X. Did this get the Tired Hands customers excited? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cheers!

 

Hope you didn’t think I was making fun of you. I was more so poking fun at the name “Big Ron”, which I still don’t understand but I thought it was light hearted. My apologies if for some reason it wasn’t. Cheers.

 

You know, that actually sounds like an opportunity for a decent side by side comparison - in that vein I would be interested in setting up tasters in order to determine the differences between the treatments. But packaged and in a store? That wouldn't interest me much - variations on a theme with the presumption that each is "better" (I would say different does not automatically equal better) as you go uphill - or are the variants just more expensive to make due to the higher ingredient cost...hmmm....