Prominent New York Times beverage writer Eric Asimov made some waves in the beer world this week when he and his tasting panel tackled a range of the highly hopped beers known as Imperial pale ales or sometimes double IPAs. (Hops, for those unfamiliar with the ingredients of beer, are comes from the vine humulus lupulus, originally added to beer as a preservative but now largely employed for their aroma and flavor characteristics, particularly bitterness.) They likely thought they were simply opening a few bottles of beer, when in fact it turns out they were dishing out a whole can of worms!
It didn’t take long for the world of beer enthusiasts to react. Over at the beer blog called Appellation Beer, a post about an anticipatory note about the article Asimov posted on his own blog started with the prescient words “Brace Yourself” and generated in short order twenty comments. Twenty-two more comments followed Asimov’s post, and several other beer blogs hosted both posts and comments focused on the piece, including this memorable note from a comment by Evan Rail at A Good Beer Blog: “Quiet is the new loud, man.”
It was at the beer chat boards that the discussion really took off, though. At the Burgundian Babble Belt, at Beer Advocate, at Rate Beer and at the Real Beer forums, the threads grew quickly and aggressively, with comments in defense of the story garnering about equal time and space with those attaching it.
So what does it all mean? Just this: There is a definite and distinct market out there for highly hopped beers, and while such brews might not fly off the shelves and out of the taps in any but the most studiously specialized beer bars, they are equally likely to be steady sellers in most beer-aware bars and even many restaurants.
As for their validity within the brewing world, which was called into question by one of the panelists, Brooklyn Brewing’s Garrett Oliver, I summon in their defense the words of the man broadly considered to be the spiritual father of American craft brewing, Fritz Maytag of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company, published way back in 1993 as part of the Foreword to Jack Erickson’s California Brewin’:
..in America (and particularly in California) we have what I like to call “cultural freedom.” By this I mean that we are not bound by traditional stereotypes of what is “good beer.” Our brewers are free to make any style of beer and our citizens feel complete freedom to drink these beers. We have new, odd, foreign, or even “far out” beers, and we can range all the brewing traditions of the world, borrowing and inventing, making things up as we go, and mixing ancient traditions with modern methods.
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