top five breweries that dont make ipas or ris

Can't you just try different beers from the breweries you like? Most every brewery I know that DOES brew an IPA and/or a RIS also brews some other fantastic beers in different styles.

Just confused over the exclusionary format.

Either way, don't think that Boulevard brews either. Might be wrong on that one though.

 

Perhaps they mean that all those other legacy brewers had been making those beers since before prohibition, but they were the first to bring new ones to market since repeal?

 

No mention of Weihenstephaner yet? They make a few varieties of beer but they're pretty much the benchmark for weizens.

 

The new Anchor website may have altered the history a bit, but they haven't yet gotten their revision of history out to the rest of the web and the bloggers and picture takers who for years have described Liberty as an APA. It is also still listed as an APA on more than one other beer rating site. And so since I first had it when it was still an APA I guess I'll continue to refer to it as an APA.

 

Totally agree. If I try a new brewery I will usually go with a style I am most farmiliar with. If I think that is good I will branch out and try more of their beers. Some breweries specialize in certain styles. But usually the top notch breweries have a pretty wide range of quality choices.

 

Troegs technically doesn't distribute an IPA or Stout (at least up to MA). They released a limited run beer earlier called Perpetual IPA that they called an "imperial pale ale", pretty much to say they've never brewed an IPA.

 

I sold Anchor in the early '00s, the story was the same then.
Also, BA lists Liberty as American IPA, and the BJCP guidelines list it as a commercial example under category 14b - American IPA. I'll believe the experts, and my own palate.
Someone can refer to Bud as a Bohemian Pils, but that doesn't make it so, especially concerning widely accepted style judging guidelines.

 

Now that's interesting. Thanks for the additional information. My memory doesn't go that far back with craft beers and Anchor so I was looking at what happens with searches on other beer rating sites and with Google searches where it turns out lots of folks refer to it as an APA rather than an IPA. I have no trouble adjusting my thinking to look at it as an IPA but am amazed at the number of folks who specifically label it as an APA.

Liberty Ale was one of my earliest introductions to craft beer and the place where I purchased it claimed it was an APA and so I never thought of it as being other than one of those APAs that illustrates that there is only a fuzzy boundary between APA and IPA territory.

 

Well, besides Fritz Maytag who created the beer and (as noted above) said he wasn't specifically thinking of IPA when he created it, there's Michael Jackson (credited- some say blamed - for creating the concept of "beer style") put Liberty Ale as the primary entry under the "Extra-Hoppy Ales" chapter in his Ultimate Beer, which begins "Not every hoppy is labeled as an IPA. Some of the hoppiest are not identified as belonging to any formal style."

The point is not to argue if Liberty Ale is an IPA, APA or whatever, just that beer style characteristics are fluid and inexact and beers aren't designed by commercial brewers to meet some organization's pigeon-holes but to satisfy the brewer and his customers. (Maytag also brewed a bottom-fermented Porter and still brews a top-fermented Bock, after all).

In Jackson's World Guide (1977) he noted less than 2 dozen "beer styles" - and IPA (much less AIPA, WCIPA or EIPA) wasn't one of them, but just considered a type of Pale Ale.