Has the craft beer world gone hopping mad?
As regular readers may know, I'm a big fan of IPAs, and the recent golden age of the style makes me glad to be alive at this time in history. Hops reign supreme these days, both in sheer variety and number, as well as how they are employed in a plethora of brews these days.
But have we reached the tipping point?
No more than a few years ago, Wormtown's Be Hoppy IPA was considered a go-to brew by numerous fans of the style. The same was true of beers such as Ballast Point's Sculpin and Green Flash's West Coast IPA. The latter took its name from the style that had gained prominence at that time: big juicy beers with a lot of citrus notes.
Not to be outdone, my neighbors here in the Northeast came up with what came to called a New England IPA: just as juicy as the West Coast style - maybe even juicier - with an added haze in its visual presentation. This juiciness, of course, came from the use of hops for the most part, although some brews use additives such as the zest of citrus fruits to up the ante.
At first, I embraced all these ventures. The more hops, the better. But after a while, I started to get palate fatigue with some of them. A decade ago, there were only a few such beers, such as Stone Ruination, that basically wrecked your tongue and made drinking anything else immediately unthinkable. In fact, that is what the name "Ruination" was meant to declare.
But now it seems that every third IPA on the market is trying to outhop the others. There are so many IPAs with huge flavor profiles and lacking any subtlety that it makes finding just a good old well-hopped beer quite an adventure. A recent peek at the beer section of Whole Foods was enough to make me shake my head. So many IPAs to try and the worry that many of them would just be hop-bombs that while tasty, would also be ones that lacked any nuance or balance. There are even plain old pale ales these days that would have been considered super-hoppy IPAs not even 10 years ago.
Don't get me wrong: There are many good and great IPAs out there. There are plenty that taste like old-school versions of the style. And clearly there is a market for the style.
But I just wonder when people will start skipping hops and jump to another style. This endless ascension into hop heaven can't last forever. And I can't help but worry that any sort of decline will hurt a lot of brewers who have hung their hats on the style.