Why all hazies taste the same

I normally don't decant my beers (even with Belgian beers), but I've recently found myself doing it more and more often with hazy IPAs - or even non-hazy IPAs like Sip of Sunshine (I think SoS is unfiltered, but I don't know for sure, but there are plenty of unfiltered IPAs, especially up here, that are not at all murk bombs). I drink a lot of SoS, but some batches have much more sediment out of suspension than others. When that's the case, I experience more astringency and more "green" flavors that I tend to dislike; not the exact same experience as hop burn, but similar. I've found simply decanting the beer and enjoying the first 14 ounces of clear, beautiful beer tends to work for me.

 

I 100% thought of this video and those Tree House beers when I read this article. They taste remarkably different, despite featuring otherwise the same recipe across the experiment.

 

I have some other thoughts on the discussion in general.

First, with their house yeast, a lot of Tree House's biggest selling IPAs do taste remarkably similar. There are of course differences, but you're starting with a baseline of the same house yeast, and often putting out IPAs at similar ABV points. There's going to be a strong similarity - and yet at the same time, that's something that makes Tree House's IPAs stand out as different from, say, Foreign Objects or even Trillium.

When you get to the importance of yeast expression in beer, and recognize that the majority of hazy IPA brewers are using one of two yeast strains (at least according to that article), then there's going to be some baseline similarities, and that's before you get into a discussion about which hop varietals are almost guaranteed to be present in so many of these beers (as @superspak pointed out).

That's no different from expecting pilsners to use the same yeast strain, some percentage of pilsner malt, and a handful of familiar hops. You expect a pilsner to have certain characteristics; that doesn't mean that they all taste the same. I'm not sure why some people would expect something radically different from hazy IPAs. "Crap, this one is juicy too! What the hell!"

Second, Tree House in particular, but certainly others like Other Half and Finback, get into a habit of taking one beer, and re-releasing it with a series of twists. Beer X; Beer X: Dry-Hopped; Beer X: Double-Dry-Hopped (but eight different versions based on featuring a single hop varietal in the dry hop); Beer XXXerrr: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Those beers are of course going to taste very similar, because they're based on tweaking the same base recipe and doing something different with it, not with brewing an entirely new beer - and it's intentional. Tree House makes that very clear with their labels: anything in the "Very" or "Triple-X Triple-R" (you know what I mean) series is based on the premise, "We wanted to take this beer and see what it was like if we massively upped the late hop additions, upping the malt bill a bit to support it with more sugar and protein," or something to that effect.

Third, back to the hops discussion. Even when you're not dealing with an evolution of a specific beer, as with the above case, you still have to recognize that if you're going for a "juice bomb" approach, there are some hop varietals that simply work much better than others. Ditto if you want a dank beer, and then whether you want more tropical or citrus fruit expression. Did all WC IPAs taste the same because we kept getting grapefruit and pine expression?

So from there, you've got very similar hop bases, especially for flavoring. Most hazy IPA brewers deploy a series of (I)IPAs with different dry hops (single varietal or multiple), but without changing the bittering or flavoring hops at all. This is pretty similar to the second point, but now, you're talking about the similarity across different breweries, where the differences are now going to come down to the brewers' skill, the specifics of the malt base (including malt adjuncts, if applicable), water chemistry, filtration, exact hopping schedule and rate, etc.

Those last things of course matter, and quite a bit, but you're starting with a baseline of the same yeast and, in many cases, very similar hop bills. Yeah, they're going to taste pretty similar - but again, so do pilsners, WC IPAs, (non-flavored) Russian Imperial Stouts ...

 

Not just NE IPAs; you see the same hate for pastry stouts. "They're all just sweet diabeetus candy bars in a glass!"

Whatever; it's "cool" to hate on styles I guess, but when people start insisting they all taste the same, that's kind of weird.

Like, there's somehow less flavor variety among pastry stouts than among, say, non-flavored and non-adjuncted Russian Imperial Stouts? You have the exact same level of flexibility with your base beer, from which you can add literally any flavoring ingredient you can imagine (and brewers have imagined some pretty weird ones), and that somehow leads to less flavor variety?

Naw, I can't get onboard with that. I can get onboard with someone simply not wanting their beer to taste like a candy bar, or straight up non-alcoholic fruit juice (way more of an issue, if one sees it as an issue, with fruited kettle "sours" than with NE IPAs, IMO). That's personal preference. I can't get onboard with extending that personal preference into a "Those grapes were probably sour, anyway," level of bias.

 

I've never experienced this except for one time not too long ago with a German NEIPA. I poured about two thirds of it into my glass and it was great. Then, on final pour, I noticed a lot of sediment and the taste basically turned into battery acid.

I think this happens when you get a can that was filled from an almost empty fermentation tank. but that's just a theory.