Tree House Julius

Has nate ever confirmed that there's some crazy yeast blend or are we still going off of that homebrewtalk thread?

 

If you trust the work of the OP of that thread it’s almost certainly confirmed that treehouse uses/used a yeast blend. There’s no good explanation for why the dna of that many different yeast strains would show up in the dregs of the can (unless it was a yeast crime scene).

What was determined with the less certainty was the exact blend of yeasts and proportions.

 

One of the best posts ive read here in a while. Trillium and OT absolutely just go for the thick, ultra hopped, acidic throat burners. There had always been something different and more complex about the Tree House IPAs, and I agree I think they've had trouble harnessing that consistently in Charlton.

 

OT?

 

*OH

 

I agree with most of the comments, but the physiological/psychological factors are also key. Psychologically it’s tough to beat the first encounter of a beloved beer, and that love may fade as other great beers enter the picture. Also I find that my taste for a beer is colored hugely by my physiological state: If I’ve gotten exercise that day, am in good health and eaten modestly I am likely to love that beer at that time; if I’m already full, tired or sullen, it won’t be so great. So anyway, it’s important to consider context.

 

Hi, it has changed quite a bit scaling up, and batch to batch since then. I’m surprised there isn’t more defensive talk of palate fatigue in this thread, something I totally disagree with in this case. The base beer taste changed when they scaled up for reasons mentioned above. Automation, different equipment, hop variance, possibly other hands and ingredients, all of those things can change s beer. Who knows for sure what the factors were. But anyone who has been tasting a large catalog of beverages for a long long time (and preferably keeps notes via untappd, etc) should not be told by others that they are being fooled by their palate, or that the over saturated neipa market makes it hard to remember stand outs. I think these ideas come from people who desire that the stuff they are buying to still be that good. That it must be their mind playing tricks on them, time and time again when countless people bring it up. The righteous defenders of the brand! lol

So to answer the thread starter yeah it’s different.

 

To pile on to this, even with a palate cleanser, if I drink something else prior to [fill in beer], it also alters my experience with that beer. So I agree with everything you said, and add that to the mix too.

 

Anyone that has done any sort of extensive blind tasting will know that a human's ability to accurately recall flavor is atrocious, even with training.

Flavor chemical identification is tied deeply to memory. And memory is incredibly linked with emotion and psychological state, before we even talk about accuracy of recall. Your palate isn't fooling you. It was never a pure memory record to begin with. I guess in a sense that we are all always being fooled by our palates at all times.

I believe if you had Julius a few hundreds times before they moved and a few times after, you could probably get a sense if it changed. Any less than that, I would be extremely skeptical.

 

To expand on what others have said, I'm only exaggerating a little to say that I personally find it relatively rare to ever have 2 beers taste exactly the same. If anything, I tend to sit up and take notice of the instances when I feel like a beer DOES live up to my memory of my best experience with that particular beer.

If you give people the exact same wine/beer/food whatever in a blind test, it's very common for them to perceive all sorts of differences that aren't actually there. This isn't to say that people can't ever detect actual differences of course. It's just that it's more difficult and fraught with psychological and perceptual pitfalls than many realize. And that's pretty much true of just about all human behaviors really.

 

To confuse matters even more, we know they tweak the recipes, the ingredients are organic products that naturally vary from batch to batch, and Julius in particular has been noted as a beer that changes pretty substantially just from sitting in the can for a couple weeks. You basically can't trust that any of this is even happening.

 

And they've Tweeted before that their hop rates have only increased for their base beers.

By far the most likely reason for drastically different perceptions of how Julius and other beers taste today is how much more commonplace this style of beer is, today.