this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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I’ve never really considered hops to be an interesting flavor. It’s just… flat and bitter to me.
I truly don’t understand why so many people love IPAs, or try to sneak extreme hoppiness into other beer styles. (An IPA with fruit juice is not a saison! And a 70 IBU “kolsch” is a war crime!)
As a person who prefers the complex, bright and earthy flavors from grains and yeast, getting face-fucked at the end of every sip by a one-note weed pine cone is so disappointing.
Single greatest description of the taste of IPA I've ever read.
Flavor nuance. I don't like hopsy beer myself, but there's a LOT of different profiles out there. I've even found a few IPAs I liked.
That I'll agree with. Not a lot of drinkers respect the mashbill anymore.
I'm the opposite. I prefer a pale ale over an IPA, but recently I found hoppy larger and it is great. I find straight larger so tasteless most of the time.
Though if I am only drinking 1 or 2 beers for the night then I would choose a dark beer.
I am not an IPA fan for the same reasons. The problem are the Brewers thinking they can just add any old hop into the mix and expect it to taste good. Then you have the consumers freaking out over a 120 IBU DIPA even though, on average, the human pallet is unable to taste anything beyond 70 IBU with an average threshold of a out 4 IBU.
Don't get me wrong, I have had some great IPAs, but the places I've enjoyed them were places that knew what they were doing. Barely any bitterness and all the hop flavor and aromas.
I used to work as a brewer where the owner wouldn't let us make any recipes of our own. All the recipes that he made us use, regardless of the style of beer, had an unforgivable amount of hops to it. The stout? 80 IBU. Fuck you, Dave.
I'm not a big beer drinker, but there are few things as disappointing as finding a bar that serves stout on tap, then discovering it's been all hopped up.
Jesus.
If you see Dave around, tell him I think his management style is as unpalatable as his beer.
I don't have a refined palette, and I like fairly hoppy beers. It has to have a good flavor to it though. If it's made hoppy for the sake of IBUs, then it's probably bad. Like joke hot sauces are disgusting, but there are some that are delicious but really painful for me to eat, even one bite.
Older IPA hops like cascade are great but only slightly hop heavy with their classic hop flavors. The hops used more recently (I think citra and mosaic?) have great flavors when pushed to high IBUs.
Hops have amazing range. Fuggles smell like dirt. Lemondrop has a strong citrus smell.
About half of beer variety is from hops. Unless your talking about Belgians. Then it's all yeast.
While making my earlier comment, I actually looked it up to see if maybe there was something unusual about my perception of hops, but didn’t want to overload folks with info. It seems that some people are more sensitive to bitter tastes, such as those in hops, and some folks can’t taste them at all. It’s like if the whole cilantro/soap thing were less a dichotomy, and more of a spectrum. (And I’m one of the people to whom cilantro tastes like soap.)
That’s not to say I don’t recognize or value the contribution of hops to beer, but hops aren’t the primary driver of most beers flavor profile, nor should they be. In most beer styles, the bitterness of the hops are used to balance the sweetness of the malt so the beer doesn’t taste like syrup. This allows other flavors in the malt to come out, or flavors from the yeast to say hi.
For me it’s a very fine line. I think I’m more sensitive than the average person.
If the bitterness does more than balance, then it dominates all other flavors, including any flavors within the hops themselves. It’s just bitter, flat, and tastes like how bad weed smells.
I don’t believe it’s a matter of unrefined taste. I can talk to you all day about floral notes of lightly roasted grains, the heavier flavors of darker roasted malts, or what kind of funk a yeasty beer has.
But hops. Too much, and it’s just one flavor for me. I think the only time I’ve been able to enjoy a hop’s flavor was when I ate a fresh one on a brewery tour.
I really enjoy mosaic hops; the best IPA I've ever had used them. There's maaaaany awful IPAs, but when done well I think they're delicious.