Breweries just don’t want to invest the time and effort it takes to brew good porters, baltics, stouts and barkeywines anymore. Where are the dubbels and triples and red ales? Scotch ale, ever heard of it? What happened to the variety? Laziness and cost cutting. Nothing but bitter piss as far as the eye can see. I quit drinking over a year ago, but sometimes I think I’d like a beer, till I look at the wall of IPAs that passes for a beer isle. Then the urge is gone.
I can take you to my local beer store in suburban Pittsburgh and show you each style you listed, alongside fruit sours, goses, and a pretty incredible variety of ciders. Pittsburgh is a hard drinking town, but I don’t think our craft beer scene is leaps and bounds ahead of other similarly-sized cities. What that tells me is that the beer you (used to) want is there if you look and that you’re more bitter than the 2x NEIPA that you’re railing against.
I haven’t had any opportunity to try a barleywine that wasn’t my wash going into a still, so you’re right on that one. That said, there’s fairly limited profiles to a lot of those types of beers.
IPAs do have a lot of variety, and all you have to do to change it up is use different hops. I don’t love IPAs, and I hate that they’re all I see in beer aisles, but I also don’t shop beer very much so whatever :)
