IPAs are an acquired taste, but the longer you drink craft beers the more likely you are to acquire it. As your palate becomes more refined, you start to appreciate different hop characteristics. Hop varieties have a wide range of flavors: floral, grassy, piney, citrusy, tropical, skunky, etc. If you’re making a “proper” beer, a nuanced hop schedule is the easiest way to create a complex flavor. IPAs have probably the highest flavor variety of any style, and most of them are pretty good once you can appreciate hops.
Except anything with Simcoe, that stuff tastes like cat piss.
I’ve tried to enjoy IPAs, really. I’m not discounting the role of interesting terpenes and flavonoids here, but the raw in-your-face excessive bitterness of IPA-level hops pushes all that great stuff so far from the stage of my experience, that it’s all left waiting in the lobby to get seated. For me, it’s like someone mixed LaCroix, light beer, and a drop of dish soap in a glass. Every time.
Try some West Coast IPAs. Pacific hops have less of that soapy bitterness with some pleasant tropical fruit notes. Galaxy is a particularly “juicy” variety, common in IPAs with “Space”, “Cosmic”, and other similar words in the name.
Other way around. West coast IPAs tend to be more bitter and resiny. NE IPAs are the hazy ones. Tend to be much fruitier and juicier.
Drink IPA without letting any air into your mouth and keep your tongue somewhat pressed against the roof of your mouth. It seems to block off the taste buds on top of the tongue and lets the beer wash around the sides of the tongue instead. This reduces the in-your-face bitterness and allows the secondary flavors to be noticed. At least that’s how I started appreciating IPAs.
Stouts and IPA are delicious.
Side note: Stone FFS bring back imperial Stout, you cunts.
As a person who likes IPAs and one of the things in the corner this meme is silly.
Fun fact: IPA stands for Indian Pale Ale. They were called that because they were shipped from England to India during the ole’ days (1800s). The purpose was to preserve the beer via it’s long journey to India. They would mellow out during the trip.
Eventually some idiots locally decided the massively hoppy beer tasted good, so it became popular in England as well, but sold as “Pale Ales”. I’ll argue it was never meant for human consumption.
There ARE craft beers that incorporate less hops and I hate that craft beer is now synonymous with hops or IPA. I hate heavy hops, but love hefeweizens, weiss, stouts, brown porters, Belgian dubble/tripels, lambics, wheats, bocks…
Nah my local expensive hipster craft beer place usually has 6 on tap. One will usually be a UK style ipa, 2-3 others will be a mix of USA/oceana style pale ales. One local brewery and one non pale ale (blonde, Porter, stout etc)
But you really can’t tell until you try them.
