IPAs : What took you so long?

I'm glad I'm not the only one, people need to branch out in beer styles other than IPAs and stouts.

 

To each their own.

 

Not everyone like country music, or Belgian quads... just be happy the scene is thriving and the profits from those ipas are funding your style

 

This is the optimistic way of looking at it. The issue is that my local beer bars have half the handles taken over by IPAs. If I enjoy other styles (specifically those lower in alcohol) I'd like my options to be more than IPAs and then Guinness if I want low abv.

Don't get me wrong, I love IPAs, but They make up a small percentage of my consumption now.

 

This may have been the case 5 to 10 years ago. But newer methods and hop varieties have created beers that have delicious tropical fruit flavors. Beginners can get behind that.

 

In my experience drinking and seeing others drink, IPAs have been popular for at least 25 years.

 

It's pretty simple: Hops taste really good. They also smell really good. Crack open a bag of hops sometime and just sniff. You will understand why IPA's are so popular.

 

That's what I thought too everyone seems to be making them now. Not that I'm complaining.

 

I'd say it's even longer than that- if we were to look at American-style IPAs as part of a continuum that began with Anchor's Liberty Ale in 1976.

 

Mostly hop varieties and beer freshness. As we all know it is imperative for IPA's to be fresh, and for them to be fresh they need to be popular enough to continue to move off the shelves. I wasn't around the beer scene but have heard about times in 90's and early 2000's when freshness was a much bigger problem. If there are only stale IPA's on shelf, newcomers who try the IPAs won't like them is much, there will be less IPA drinkers and the freshness problem will continue. With there increased popularity has come increased possibility for freshness, which further increases the popularity.

 

A little confused as perhaps I am reading the OP's original comments differently. 20+ years ago when I started drinking craft beer there were beers with a hop profile in the fore-front but they certainly were not the dominant style. Somewhere about X years ago a hop obsession really came to the fore-front in the American Craft scene which doesn't really appear to be slowing down as more extremes are released and experiments with different hop varietals.

 

Hop shortages are increasing becoming a big problem with IPAs and the like which in turn will cause some to be more innovative.

 

An anecdotal story. Victory Brewing opened in 1996. They started with four beers: Brandywine Valley Lager, Fest, Prima Pils, and HopDevil IPA. The two owners (Ron Barchet and Bill Covaleski) had beer training in Germany and they thought that their German style lagers would be the big sellers. To their surprise, the IPA (HopDevil) was their big seller when they first opened. So, it would appear that IPAs were in big demand 17 years ago (at least in Pennsylvania).

Cheers!

 

Took (me) a little while..at first I found Most of them too much for me to handle, but nowadays I'm pretty much a strictly IPA guy. However they aren't for everyone, I understand why though. If everybody had the same tastes..all bttl shops would carry would be one kind of Wine, Liquor, or Beer.
-cheers!

 

My first IPA was Ballantine's around 1974, and it had been around for a long time. Edit - more of a British style, with old school hops like Bullion, Cluster, Brewers Gold.

 

American IPAs are nothing new where I live. If you could see an animated map showing a single point for every review/rating of every hoppy IPA over the last few decades, I would take a guess that you'd see a general trend of something starting in the West and slowly moving east (or maybe starting in the West, then popping up in the East, and now filling in the middle). It seems that wild ales/sours might now be following a similar trend.

 

I was drinking IPAs in Nam while looking for charlie. Nothing like the smell of hops in the morning!

 

I consider folks that just drink one style to be craft beer hacks. A connoisseur like myself can drink and enjoy anything from a light adjunct lager to a double bourbon barreled stout.

 

I completely agree. I'm constantly trying beers all accross the style board and never drink one style for a long period of time.