IPAs too different

Re-reading the OP I caught the "malty" notes and yes, that says old IPA suffering from hop fade.

 

Don't give up on New England (D)IPAs. Slurm Lord doesn't seem to be a particularly great one with a 3.85 Avg.

 

Send the rest my way. And some M43

I'm with you though, not just in the IPA realm, I try and grab singles before I commit to a whole sixer of something. Too much good beer out there to take chances on a $12-15 sixer, without having any inclination.

 

I see where the OP is coming from but, to me, this is just another example of how the beer world is increasingly becoming more like the wine world where the consumer must educate themselves in order to make the right buying decisions. The amount of diversity within styles and the prevalence of experimentation has made it so that, no matter what the official style the beer is labeled as, what's in the glass can be quite far from what's expected of that style. Just like a Cab from one winery made from grapes from a certain vineyard from a certain region can taste wildly different from another Cab from a different winery made from grapes from a different vineyard from a different region. It's still a Cab. Do we need more subgenres within the IPA style? No. Breweries just need to be sure to provide the consumer with information about the beer on the label (i.e. what hop varietals were used, whether dry-hopping was involved, if it's unfiltered or filtered, tasting notes) and the consumer needs to know enough about beer to read the label and understand what kind of flavor profile to expect. The craft beer world is developing to the point where the learning curve is getting steeper and steeper.

 

Don't forget the "east Coast ipa - more balanced than west coast, still clear, but more of a malt backbone than the west coast, which is more hop driven.
Plus the others, "black IPA"
fruited IPA,
Imperial
and so on.
There's not so many sub-catagories of IPAs it's hard to see where the line is at the light side between IPA and Pale Ale (Some labeled as one could easily be the other) and at the high end either hoppy stout or barleywine.

As someone else mentioned, OP, do you still have the bottles? Can you tell us what IPA it was and if there is a bottled on date or code on the bottle? IT does sound like you had one that was on the older side, where the hops may have faded away - they can do so, general rule of thumb is somewhere around 3 months old, but some can last longer or shorter, depending on a lot of things.

 

Because they use flaked oats to enhance mouthfeel is that enough for a sub category? It's still a grain.

 

Let me ask a clarifying question: Should NE IPA be a separate style?

 

Perhaps the problem is that breweries are calling everything they make an IPA. As you have pointed out, it makes the use of 'style' terminology completely useless. More categorization would further muddy the waters.

 

Can somebody point me to where it says "tastes like to me" or "doesn't taste like to me" is the way beer styles have been, or should be, categorized/defined/illustrated/exemplified?

I once made a rattlesnake stew using a chicken stew recipe (the flavors are similar). Some of my friends who didn't have access to the ingredients list complimented the flavors, etc. of the chicken stew I'd made.

But somehow I couldn't quite believe that somehow I'd magically turned that dead rattlesnake into a dead chicken.

 

You are 100% correct here. If breweries are viewing "IPA" as a marketing term than creating more substyles will not 'fix' the issue here. There is absolutely no way to enforce that breweries label their beers to a prescribed list of beer definitions.

Cheers!

 

Before this get too far, I WAS making a joke! (re: dozens -- it seems -- threads asking this question!)

 

This is the crux of the problem. Marketing any ole thing under the IPA name like they used to do with Pilsner.

 

That's the point right there. Too many sub-categories and you just confuse 80% of beer drinkers as a whole. Nobody except geeks want to have to learn a whole new vocabulary of what to drink. It's like metal-heads who need to fight over which bands are metal-core, speed metal, thrash metal, black metal, and I can't bother with figuring out the difference. Just let the packaging and label, and the flavor, speak for itself and don't be disingenuous about what is in the bottle or nobody will trust your beer again.

 

This discussion seems to have taken a path towards discussing ‘labeling’ and marketing of beers. For those of you who have interests here I would strongly suggest you watch this presentation:

 

No modern beer tastes remotely like a traditional IPA.Bone dry,low ABV and long aged.
For most of the 20th century IPA was simply another name for Bitter,under 4% ABV and 30ish IBUs.