There Are Too Many IPAs On the Market - Here's Why I'm Adding a Few More

Awkward Hug IPA - the first non-funky beer released at Kent Falls.

It's pretty well established that there are just way too many IPAs on the market. We beer drinkers can't shut up about IPAs — especially if we happen to think the style is overrated. Great flamewars are wrought in the embers of the hatred some bear for hoppy beers, and the fact that some believe they're ruining craft beer. (In addition to gose, which is also supposedly ruining craft beer, leading me to believe that one of my favorite non-styles of beer, dry-hopped gose, is extra super duper killing craft beer).

The IPA category (and its offspring) grows determinedly year after year, continuing its domination as the most popular style in craft beer. And while AB has yet to release Bud Lite India-Pale-Ale-Rita, even the big guys have found ways to jump in on the craze here and there, with offerings like Blue Moon White IPA, Yuengling IPL, and for a truly perplexing example, Guinness Blonde Lager (which makes the interesting assumption that the type of consumer who would wish to buy a "blonde lager" brewed by Guinness would really be sold by the presence of Mosaic hops in such a beer).

That is the weird conundrum that IPA finds itself in these days, when undeniably there are many breweries that feel compelled by a demanding and thirsty market to produce an IPA that they may have little interest in making otherwise. No brewery, big or small, should feel compelled to make a beer they don't want to make. But when it comes to IPA, it's never just some vague guesswork at what the market wants. Many people will tell you, accounts will tell you, flat out, that you need to brew an IPA. (Especially in a market where the phrase "sour beer" is largely met with blank stares). In this sense, the sense of demanding that all breweries make an IPA even when they have no interest in doing so, yes, there are too many IPAs. There are absolutely too many IPAs on the market. It's gotten a little crazy over here.

I've gotten into this conversation a couple times now, recently. As often as you catch the "everyone has to brew an IPA or die," viewpoint, you'll hear the exact opposite, argued from an individual's own tastes. At a recent dinner conversation, someone tried a test batch of a saison I was working on and remarked how they liked the different path my beers took. They said: "Just please don't do an IPA."

If you have been reading Bear Flavored for some time, it's not a surprise to you that I (really, really) love hoppy beers. My focus has always been this: one part funky weird beers, one part clean juicy hoppy beers, and one part funky weird juicy hoppy beers. These are the things I like to drink so they are therefore the things I like to brew.

For better or worse, I'm still brewing with this same mindset as a commercial brewer. Focusing on tart and funky farmhouse beers for the Connecticut market probably isn't the smartest idea on paper. But all I really know how to do is brew the beer that I want to drink (as I said; for better or worse), and hope other people like it too. And if they don't care for that type of beer, honestly, it doesn't bother me too much. Tastes differ! And also I'm an incredibly selfish person so there's that as well.

There aren't currently any other farmhouse breweries in Connecticut, and hardly any breweries here are doing any kind of farmhouse / funky beers, so I'm curious if it will seem disingenuous for us to brew IPAs. If the mission of Kent Falls was explicitly, say, "Belgian-inspired beers," having a series of Northeast-style IPAs be our only "American" offering might seem kind of cynical. Fortunately, we haven't actually debuted all that many beers just yet, so we're still in the early stages of defining ourselves, and shaping what people expect from us (even the wildest and most experimental breweries want to have a common through-line). The framework, at least in my head, is to simply brew in the farmhouse mentality: refreshing beers that are satisfying to drink after a long day's work. And really, I think, that's pretty much saying the same thing as: "we brew whatever we feel like drinking." Because whatever you feel like drinking is that which is going to satisfy you after a long day's work.

So that's one reason I feel the market should have more IPAs: if a brewer is really, genuinely super passionate about a particular style, I think they should make that style.

The second reason I don't feel even slightly bad about adding more IPAs to an already-crowded IPA market: IPAs are like bread. Hear me out. Every town in America could have a bakery and everything would be just fine. No one would get into arguments about the Bakery Bubble. We understand, fundamentally, that bread is better fresh, even if we've entirely abandoned buying it so. I haven't counted how many towns there are in America lately, but I'm pretty sure there would be at least, like, 45 bakeries in this one-bakery-per-town situation. I don't know. Maybe half a million? Literally anywhere in that range sounds reasonable to me. Point being, good bread made right is really, really, really best fresh, and therefore you could never really have enough bakeries, if everyone switched to only buying freshly-baked bread from good artisan local bakeries. If everyone switched to only buying freshly-baked bread from good artisan local bakeries, the whole bread world would be revolutionized, and good bread would become far more accessible to the average person by supporting and allowing such bakeries to be ubiquitous and accessible. (American bread currently, in case you were wondering, is largely atrocious. I wish very much and desperately that the same movement that fixed beer would please get around to fixing bread on the whole).

IPAs, like bread, are best very, very fresh. (At least, a large number of people these days would say so). Yes, in spite of the old semi-stretched-truth story of IPAs being sent to India for their powers of preservation. Just because an aggressively hoppy beer may stave off infection in a boat to India for longer periods of time, that doesn't mean this is the best way to drink it. (Besides, their IPAs were likely totally different from what we're brewing now anyway). Most IPA fans today seem to be gravitating toward incredibly super extra fresh IPAs, and I'm right there with them. Hop oils break down quickly, and even in the best storage conditions, IPAs can lose some of their magic spark within a couple weeks, leaving nothing but bland uniform bitterness with no nuance. Industrial bread bakers could find ways to cheat around the freshness of their bread, but ultimately, having access to fresh bread is always going to be better. Some large breweries like Sierra Nevada, Stone and Lagunitas have figured out the logistics of hauling IPA all around the country and maintaining quality, and god bless them. I have infinite respect for the big breweries that do it right. But all things considered, it's simply easier to ensure that a beer is fresh if you're producing small quantities of it, sold quickly, within a local market which will consume it fast. And that is my goal: whatever it takes to ensure the drinker of such a beer receives the freshest and best IPA possible.

So yes, I do think there is room in the market for more IPAs. Not if everyone wants to grow to the size of Stone or Lagunitas or Sierra Nevada, no: they're already playing that game way better than most of us ever could. But if every town in the country (or world!) had a great little bakery and a handful of small-batch, fresh IPAs, always going out the door so quickly that they were always consumed super bright and aromatic? That wouldn't be such a bad world to live in.

Perfecting Already-Good Recipes and Rebalancing IPAs - Experiences with London Ale III in American IPAs

Beer: Morgan Horse DIPA
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Imperial IPA
Brewed: 7.7.14
Kegged On: 7.31.14
ABV: 8%

Appearance: pale golden orange, hazy, ample head, good retention
Smell: grapefruit, citrus, peach, soft mellon fruit, dank, pine
Taste: zesty grapefruit, orange, citrus, soft peach, melon, pine, mild finishing bitterness
Mouthfeel: light body, medium carbonation, soft, crisp finish

You know when you have a goal in mind that you probably couldn't fully describe to anyone but a few of your imaginary friends (they're the only ones that get you, anyway) — you just know that you'll know when you get there? In previous years, I couldn't describe exactly why my IPAs kept falling short of what I wanted them to be. I just knew there was something else I wanted them to be. No matter how good I felt about them after a solid brew-day, or as they went through fermentation, a week or two after bottling, some slight disappointment would creep in. Maybe they were getting closer, but they weren't where I wanted them to be. And I wasn't even sure how to describe where I wanted them!

After much work and brainstorming and espionage, I think now I might be there — or at least, past the point where subsequent refinements will be almost unnoticeable to anyone less anal retentive than myself. I may not have the Ark of the Covenant in my personal possession per se, but at least, at last, I found the convoy of Nazis trying to make off with it, and I'm even reasonably confident I'm riding on the roof of the very truck they have the Ark inside. #metaphors

I don't think anything is ever beyond improvement, believe me. I'm not talking about perfection yet, not by a long shot — ie, a level of purity defying any further improvement. In this case, I'm just talking about meeting certain expectations. Expectations that, a year ago, I wasn't sure I'd ever meet. I was looking to get my IPAs to a certain level, make them drink a certain way, with a certain flavor profile, and not completely dive off a cliff after the first two weeks. Having a very good feeling about this batch from the start, I waited for my first pull off the keg until I was sure the beer would be properly conditioned, resisting the urge to sneak early tastes. I'm glad I did. With that first glass, I had one of those rare moments where, in spite of my overwhelmingly cynical nature compelling me to constantly be disappointed in everything, I found I had hit my goals. After a couple of sips, I burst out laughing.

Of course, I've been pretty happy with all my IPAs this year, to the point where most of the time I'd rather have one of my own than something from the average bar or bottle shop. If that sounds super snobby, or this whole post already sounds pretentious, consider that homebrewers have an advantage in catering things to their specific preferences, not to mention the advantage of freshness (provided you can drink the whole batch fast enough). Realistically, the improvements in these beers have been fairly incremental from batch to batch, and Morgan Horse IPA, an 8% just-imperial using Simcoe and Amarillo with a dash of Columbus, might just be me getting all the small things right, all at once. The batch previous to this (which I never wrote up, so I'm kind of lumping into this post) was pretty close to the best IPA I've brewed previous to this one, though it used hops I enjoy more: Mosaic, Galaxy and Amarillo. I loved the Azacca IPA I did in the spring, also enjoyed the Shrunken Heady I did, and the year's first IPA was also tasty as hell. My IPAs have been getting consistently better with almost every batch. Such a trackable progression gives me a lot of confidence. So what have I been changing?

The first big change I made to my process may still be the most important thing differentiating all these IPAs from previous batches. I started kegging, and immediately fixed up a rather elaborate set-up to better emulate the process a brewery would have. The beer gets transferred into a secondary keg fitted with two stainless steel filter screens over the dip-tube to prevent it from clogging. I'll usually do a first-stage dry-hopping at the end of fermentation in the primary, then transfer to the initial keg about a week and a half after brew-day. The second-stage dry-hops go into this keg, loose (the filters over the dip tube are much more effective than trying to constrain the hops themselves) for about five days. After five days, I'll cold crash in my keezer for another day or two, then do a keg-to-keg transfer into a serving keg. Perhaps I could just drink the beer off the first keg, but I like that this roughly emulates what a brewery would do (very few breweries would package their beers with the hops still in there, and my goal was to go at this from the same playing field). Theoretically, also, this gives me the chance to use the dry-hopping keg as a brite tank and clear the beer a bit more, though they've still been pretty hazy for the first couple weeks. (I used gelatin to clear my IPAs a few times, which helped. Then I sort of forgot about it).

Another recent change I've been trying out: English yeast strains for American IPAs. Conan was my go-to for the last two years, but it's a finicky strain to work with, and up until very recently there was no good source for the yeast other than culturing it up from cans of Heady Topper (itself quite difficult to obtain on a regular basis). Following lead after lead as I chased the secret of the great new-wave IPAs, I heard from a couple sources that one of my favorite Green Mountain state brewers was using the Boddington's strain, which is supposed to be London Ale III. And after hearing this same speculation a number of times, I had to give it a try. WWSHD?

Using English yeast strains in American IPAs isn't a totally novel idea — plenty of awesome breweries are doing it (Hill Farmstead, The Alchemist, Tired Hands, Cigar City, Three Floyds, Surly, Firestone Walker, Stone), and enough of them are brewing IPAs I love that I figured there must be something to it. While I prefer most styles of beer on the dry side, I also like my IPAs to be soft and silky and elegant, in contrast to the usual bitterness-focused West Coast model of the last decade. The logic behind the choices of these brewers makes sense: an English yeast strain might not attenuate as highly, but attenuation can be worked around, and careful management of the yeast will allow for a mild base of fruity esters to accentuate the brightness of the hops, soften the palate, and give an impression of balance without going overboard on the malts.

It especially makes sense when you're going for an IPA that drinks smoother and softer than the usual. I've been calling this ideal profile in my head the "Rebalanced IPA." I hate dividing up styles into sub-styles always, but there are enough breweries out there brewing this new profile of hoppy beer that I think it's worth considering that it may be a novel and separate approach, utilizing new techniques and a new way of looking at the structure that holds an IPA together. The Rebalanced IPA is as distinct to me, at least, as the old East Coast vs. West Coast IPA concepts.

Anyway, London Ale III seems to help with that balance. It also achieves the sort of saturated, soft mouthfeel I've been wanting for my IPAs. But then again, when it's cooperating, so does Conan. Similar somewhat, different somewhat, probably both with their pro's and con's. LAIII is a huge top-cropper, with a krausen persisting on every one of my brews for days after fermentation was over. Despite that, it starts up very quickly, very aggressively, and attenuates well enough. I've been nudging the temperature higher each time, against my original instinct to ferment in the mid-60's — I'm now thinking it likes it around 68 F, maybe even 70 F. But I'll keep playing around, of course. And soon, very soon hopefully, I'd like to do side-by-side batches with London Ale III and Conan. Gotta keep it scientific!

Finally, the mysterious world of water treatment. Undoubtedly hugely important! My take on this too has been evolving dramatically. But water gets so complicated, and to me, somewhat cryptic, perhaps it's an analysis left for vague unpacking some other time. I will say, for now, that a great place to start is deciding whether you agree with Vinnie Cilurzo's tips for brewing better IPAs. That classic treatment is great for a particular breed of IPA, but I'm fairly sure that a lot of the IPA brewers that I prefer are not, regardless of their starting mineral content, just dumping in some gypsum and calling it a day.

Recipe-
5.5 Gal., All Grain
Mashed at 152 degrees for 60 minutes
Fermented at 68 F
OG: 1.073
FG: 1.012
ABV: 8%

Malt-
76.5% [11#] 2-row malt
7% [1#] white wheat malt
7% [1#] Cara-Pils
3.5% [8 oz] Golden Naked Oats
5.2% [12 oz] corn sugar

Hop Schedule-
1 oz CTZ @FWH
2 oz Amarillo hop stand for 45 minutes
2 oz Simcoe hop stand for 45 minutes
1 oz CTZ hop stand for 45 minutes
1 oz Amarillo dry hop for 5 days [primary]
2 oz Simcoe dry hop for 5 days [primary]
1 oz Amarillo dry hop for 5 days [secondary keg]
2 oz Simcoe dry hop for 5 days [secondary keg]

Yeast-
Wyeast London Ale III

Where Are All the New York Wild Ales?

What do disaster movies, romantic comedies, and the birth of hip hop all have in common? Chances are, when you're picking a location, it's gonna come down to either California or New York. The two states have long been seen as either rivals or bizarro counterparts, hotbeds of culture with recognizable skylines for aliens or monsters to blow up real good. The states are similar in many ways even outside of their manufacture of culture: huge population centers anchor the state, while the majority of their geography is farms and mountains and all sorts of pretty scenery (well, I guess California has a few more deserts than NY.)

Unfortunately, the comparison and rivalry hasn't been true of beer, at least not for the last few decades. While New York at one point dominated the industry, and supplied almost all of its hops, it's now playing an (admirably energetic) game of catch up, and the state gov is giving it a real good push. By sheer number of breweries, it's undeniable that the brewing industry in New York is exploding. At the annual TAP NY beer festival, the NY State Brewers Association announced there are currently 154 breweries. In 2011, there were only around 50 in the state. By next year, I wouldn't be surprised if the count tops 200.

Do you remember when I wrote that article about the dudes at The Brewery at Bacchus? Do you remember how I called them the Most Interesting Brewery in New York That You've Never Heard Of? Six months in, those guys are knocking out all sorts of barrel-aged Brett saisons and Berliner Weisse and such, with a number of other sours in the works — which, depending where you live in the country (or the world), may not sound all that remarkable. It's kind of hot right now, that wild stuff, right? It certainly is in sunny California.

The other week, Mike and Jason of Brewery at Bacchus Tweeted this:

Drinking an amazing @AlmanacBeer Reserve Pluot wine barrel aged sour. Great beer. New York neeeeds beers like this pic.twitter.com/VCYfuEDSnM
— Bacchus of New Paltz (@Bacchus462) April 26, 2014

First of all, I personally love the hell out of Almanac. I loved them the first I ever saw their incredible bottle design, I love their model, and I love the beer they make. The sours I've had from them have been world class. So yes, I agreed with Jason and Mike's random musing, and it got me thinking about this lament more... literally.

Where are all the sour beers in New York? And what does that say about our brewing scene?

There's a lot of analysis to be done with what's happening here in general; New York is in the middle of a paradigm shift. I still can't figure out why we're starting out so far behind other states, but regardless, we're finally going from almost nothing, the pack of the back, to a huge explosion in both state attention, local interest, and micros opening their doors. And a bunch of new businesses opening their doors all at once, as the first wave of a trend, tend to follow the most straightforward, conservative business model. Most new breweries tend to be small or medium-small; even now, there are very few in NY that even distribute throughout much of the state. I think there's at least a few articles to be gleaned from this alone, but that's just to set the context.

So almost all these breweries starting up are scrappy nanos with lots of help from friends and family and probably not a ton of funding. In fact, I'd wager that the majority of the breweries that have opened here in the last year are 3 bbl or smaller (super-nano), with probably only a handful over 10 bbl in size. (Conventional wisdom for a while has been that you need to brew at least 7 bbl to survive long term, so we'll see what this nano-craze demonstrates about that.) Now that NY is offering a farm brewery license, many are hungry to just get some beer out there. Most don't have the funding to take big risks or spend extra on things like a barrel-aging program. Most of them, frankly, are homebrewers who splurged on a license and a slightly larger system, and being a homebrewer myself, I don't mean that to sound condescending. Nano-breweries have intriguing potential, even at 20 gallon (yes, gallon) batches, regardless of the economics of it all. But it's a lot of work and very risky. I get it. 

Still, why is it starting to seem like every startup brewery's lineup has to look like some slight variation of this?

 

Not that there's anything wrong with those beers on their own, or even as a majority. For many, the appeal of craft beer is four things: creativity, variety, quality and local-ness. There are plenty of breweries bringing the 'local' angle, but frankly, 'local' can't be the only selling point of a sustainable brewery. I don't want to get into the quality debate today, just the variety and creativity stuff. For a state that's largely farms, and an industry being heavily pushed toward support of farms, it's jarring to me that there's such a lack of sours and mixed culture, farmhouse beers. There's a lot of other stuff missing too, but I'm cherry-picking one type of beer to stand in for brewery innovation (granting that just a well-brewed English mild on cask pump would seem almost as unique and exciting to me). I think it's a useful example. Wild ales strike me as a marker for a certain kind of mindset, an eagerness to break from the Same Six Styles Syndrome. And because playing with Brett & Bugs scares off a lot of brewers, a dedication to producing them regularly seems to also offer at least a slight indication that a brewer has their shit together. (Though tapping just one random batch of a sour, let's say barleywine may just be an indication that, whoops, let's not dump this one batch of infected beer if people will pay money for it?)

Maybe, I'm just really bothered by the seemingly inescapable mindset that every brewery needs to have a few styles we've silently designated as "The Beers Everyone Has to Make to Keep Average Drinkers Happy." It seems presumptuous. Is a fruity, yeasty Brett saison going to be that harder for the average person to swallow than a fruity, yeasty hefeweizen?

I have complained about this for years, loudly and often (to my friends' great delight), but never thought to put it in cold, hard statistical terms. I got curious — is anyone in New York actually regularly producing wild ales? How many brewers in New York actually have some kind of barrel program? From a quick check on Beer Advocate, the state has about as many breweries as neighbouring Pennsylvania. Off the top of my head, without even digging around, I can name at least half a dozen PA breweries regularly releasing wild ales in bottles (which signifies some level of commitment, in my opinion.) In New York, I could think of just one, Captain Lawrence, plus a few "kind-ofs" in various stages of development, or going through expansions and shifts in focus (Ithaca, who has released lots of incredible sours previously, but seems to be shifting their attention elsewhere lately.) But maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe I'm being curmudgeonly and I'm just not looking hard enough. So it's time for some crude statistical analysis.

One recent Friday night, being the hip, socially-ambitious person I am, I spent a few hours clicking through the New York brewery list on Beer Advocate, analyzing every beer brewed in New York... at least that's made it onto the site. (What, like you have something better to do on a Friday night?) Obviously, this isn't perfect methodology, but it was the only realistic and consistent methodology for the moment. We're seeking the NY-equivalent of Almanac, Ale Apothecary, Allagash, The Bruery, Cascade, Crooked Stave, Hill Farmstead, Jester King, Jolly Pumpkin, Forest & Main, Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, Lost Abbey, Night Shift, the Rare Barrel, Prairie, Russian River, Tired Hands, Yazoo, etc etc etc, where the wild-side is obvious and the doors to the farmhouse are wide open. Some very small start-ups might not have all their beers listed on Beer Advocate yet, which leads to some fuzzy categorizing, but for the sake of this article, I'm looking to broadly define "regular producers of sour / wild / farmhouse beer in NY." A beer with only two ratings and no details, that seems to have been released only once, is obviously not something that was a big push.

In addition, there are a number of breweries I'll mention that look to be branching out into these sorts of brews, which is awesome. I don't want this article to come across as overly critical, simply... observational. Even as the market becomes saturated and the Bubble stretches, it is my opinion that there is still a lot of opportunity out there. If in two years this article is completely irrelevant and seems stupid, that's a very good thing. Sound fair?

So after those hours of research, what did I end up with? Not much that I wasn't aware of before I started. The similarity of offerings by small start-up nanobreweries is seriously jarring when you start looking at page after page of them in a row.

Let's phrase it this way: say you have a friend in California and you want to show them what's going on in New York. You want to send them some beer. [How many breweries make a draft-only geuze, anyway?] In bottles, your options for funky and farmhouse fare is... still not much. There's Captain Lawrence, of course. They've had a really good barrel program for years, releasing one or two world-class wild ales a year, on average. So hopefully you can find one of those, because there are only a handful of other breweries in New York putting sours / wilds in bottles, and most of the rest are tiny, or don't seem too committed to the genre. Shmaltz releases He'Brew Funky Jewbelation annually; a blend of different barrels, Funky Jewbelation sounds like it's at least on the sour spectrum, though it's listed as a strong ale. I'm not even sure about that one, as I haven't had it myself. Scaling down considerably from there, if you're one of my neighbors, you can stop at the farmer's market to pick up one of Evan's Plan Bee Brewery creations, which are very small releases, mostly wild yeast and farmhouse-inspired stuff. Evan does a little bit of everything, but I love his mindset, and I love his "hyper-local, self-sourced" model. You've got two more options if you live in NYC, where the very very tiny brewery Big Alice seems to have bottled a few experiments, and Transmitter Brewing opened its doors literally as I was writing this article. Of all the breweries mentioned in this article, Transmitter seems most likely to have the dedication to funk that I'm looking for. But with these small guys, to re-iterate, we're kind of looking into the future: they're just getting started, and can't make enough beer to supply their own neighborhoods right now.

Elsewhere, it's not too hard to find breweries that occasionally do Berliner Weisse and Gose, which are part of a genre I'm calling 'quick sours', beers that employ the sour mash method (or something like it.) Especially if you're just looking for it on draft at the brewery — that's way more do-able. Notably, Peekskill Brewery's Simple Sour is one of the few beers that's always on tap there, and makes appearances at bars throughout the Hudson Valley and NYC. Of the dozen or so other breweries that have done quick sours in New York state, there's still hardly anyone packaging  — Poughkeepsie-area Sloop Brewing are some of the only guys regularly bottling a Berliner-ish beer that I could dig up. So your bottle hunt hasn't gotten much easier, and you'll have to be in the right place at the right time to even to fill up a growler.

What about Brett beers and not-quite sours? You don't always need the acid; maybe you just want some breezy light funk. In bottles, Ithaca and Brooklyn, two of the largest breweries in the state, just released Brett-aged beers of the Belgian bent. Ithaca is an interesting case: the new Luminous seems to be a reinvention of the retired sour ale Brute, though it's unclear how Ithaca will handle their sour program now. Since expanding the brewery, it's been difficult to tell whether they'll keep the same focus on the former barrel program; most attention seems to be on new seasonals. I've also heard that Luminous is not a full sour, but a tart Brett beer, so keep that in mind when looking to drop some acid. (Lactic and acetic acid, I mean.) For now, I'll file Ithaca tentatively under the "irregular sour producer" folder. Another big guy, Ommengang, recently released Wild at Heart, a rich, malty 100% Brett beer that most would mistake for simply another Belgian. One more wild ale option in bottles, though not very wild in the general scheme of things.

All existing brews considered, we're looking at a handful of options, and only a few breweries giving such beers regular attention. As far as my general complaint about variety, yes, there are certainly breweries experimenting and innovating in other ways, and a couple existing breweries have shown interest in embracing the funk as soon as they can. Peekskill, for one, already has a coolship and some wild ale fermenting that's likely to be incredible. Jeff O'Neil will be giving us more than a few delicious sours down the road, so you've gotta (patiently) factor that in. As will a few of the newbies. I have high hopes for Transmitter Brewing, which looks to be perhaps the first NY brewery focused mostly on farmhouse / wild ales. Also in Queens, newly-opened Finback looks to be dabbling in the realm too. I must also mention that their borough-neighbors Kelso of Brooklyn have done limited draft releases of some incredible sours in the past, though they're very hard to find, and I haven't seen any in a while.

Picking out breweries doing sour beer as an indicator of larger trends is slightly arbitrary, and again, I don't want to make it sound like I think wild ales are the only way left to innovate in beer. Even if this is largely just an article about the lack of a certain kind of beer in the New York market, I think maybe it says a bit more than that. If you work at a brewery, you're probably yelling at the screen at me: "Of course none of these small start-up breweries are doing sours, you diptube, they're the most expensive, unreliable, and time-consuming type of beer to produce!" Yes, absolutely fair. And let's be reasonable, in another few years, when some of these breweries have gotten their footing, I suspect we'll have another dozen or so beers to add to this list. You've got half a dozen options and then some pending maybes and beyond that, a lot of pale ales and ambers and flavored stouts and fruit beers with wheat. New York has the resources, the farms, the scenery; it deserves to have the ingenuity too. Right now, I can go to Bacchus or Peekskill and enjoy some world-class, truly creative beer while appreciating the gorgeous surroundings. As we try to change our beer scene from the farm on up, I want to see that sense of terroir and fermentive curiosity expand across the state, and see local flavor come to mean more than just Cascade hops from a vine in the backyard. Are farm brewers really embracing 'local' if they're putting out the same six beers as basically every suburban brewpub in the country?

The notion of the modern farm brewery is a fascinating and exciting vision, to me. I can't believe it's a coincidence that some of the most lauded and sought-out breweries in the world right now have close ties to the farmhouse model. And I can't wait to see it explored further, in New York, and elsewhere. Seeing the local harvest reflected in the ingredients and structure of a beer is awesome. Seeing it reflected in the weird and wild microbial world from which those crops spring — at least some of the time, in some beers — is even better.

There's More to Beer Than Some 'Drinkable' vs.'Crazy Extreme!' Dichotomy

Pictured: the personification of craft beer in the eyes of your local news reporter.

One basic rule of the universe (other than me being unable to write a blog post that's not entirely too long) is that humans love duality. Sorry to get all philosophical on you guys, but take any issue or thing or important staple of human life, and we humans will talk and talk about it until all discourse has been boiled down to two diametrically opposing sides. We love exclusive viewpoints, for some reason.

I could pick out a bunch of examples with beer. Beer is a thing that has always been popular, but which, recently, has become explosively popular to discuss. And that's great, because beer is a much better thing to talk about than, say, teen pop stars. Lately, the biggest talking point has probably been the whole "craft beer vs. corporate beer" thing. Debating whether such a distinction has merit would send this off into an entirely separate discussion, but for now, let's just note that we've created a vast, arbitrarily two-party system by which to divide the beer world. Why two? Why cap it by random numbers of production? In reality, even beer nerds don't really care what a brewery's production level is — unless that becomes a factor in the quality of the beer. What people care about is the quality of the beer.

And that's where it becomes tricky to establish two clear sides, though people are still inclined to try to do so. So for now there is craft vs. crafty, but those lines are unclear and meaningless to most people. There is good beer and there is bad beer, but you'll never get anyone to agree on which is which. There are many others, but most recently, I see a new push: people trying to draw a line in the sand between "drinkable beer" and "over-the-top beer."

To be clear, I'm of the mindset that almost any issue worth talking about is hopelessly convoluted and that, in general, there are few absolutes in life, other than the presence of the Great Old Ones watching us from their seat in the dark immutable heart of the universe. Just, so you know, my philosophy. We live on a rotating sphere forged of unanswerable existential quandaries, the gnawing itch of which shall tear at our small but curious minds forevermore. "Which member of the Just'in Beebers is the hottest?" our younglings shriek to themselves, desperately fixing their eyes upon whatever fleeting curiosity allows them to pretend that the cavernous nothingness does not loom above. To wit: some people think craft beer is threatening to jump the shark with all its crazy wild ingredients and over-the-top experiments. There is a core of truth to this, in that many craft brewers do focus on gimmicky creations — or else set themselves up in staunch opposition to this Straw Man, arguing that their middling beer lineup is just fine because competitors are brewing outrageous beer aged on straw men and bourbon-soaked corncobs. And with this duality, there's now a feeling among drinkers that the opposite of an amber ale is the weirdest and wackiest beer you can imagine. One recent article, prompted by some of Dogfish Head's madder creations, asks its readers: "So is this the future of U.S. beer consumption - a country that stumbles over itself to buy beer made with wild-carrot seed, bee balm, chanterelle mushrooms, and aged in whiskey barrels?"

Yes, those wacky beers do exist. Sometimes an unlikely-sounding beer proves to be popular. No, that will not be the future of U.S. beer consumption, but I do predict that this sort of division — this separation of beer into "crazy! over-the-top! experimental!" and "just a solid drinkable beer, man" — will be another trend in beer commentary for a few years. Is it just me, or can you see where this is going? It's an easy, convenient simplification to divide the beer world into down-to-earth, everyman breweries with the classic five or six styles, versus brewers doing nothing but that crazy extreme stuff. You know, for hipsters.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. And in fact, pigeon-holing beers into either extreme completely misses the point of what makes beer good in the first place.

So what actually does make a beer interesting, once you strip out the Moon Rocks and Ghost Chili addition or cactus-bark barrel aging? What makes a beer over-the-top, versus classic and approachable, anyway? Beyond a few overly-obvious answers, I'm inclined to believe that the real, actual, technical details are just far more boring than the average person cares to deal with. For example, I think water profile, oxygen management, and deliberate timing of hop additions are what makes a great IPA... not IBUs or ABV. Farmhouse ales and sours are about as traditional and historic as one can get, but they're now rare, and thus 'hyped.' Utilizing wild yeast is simply embracing the natural premise of fermentation. And beer has been barrel-aged for a lot longer than the term 'craft' has been around. But that's dry commentary, and you can't wedge a discussion about "extreme vs drinkable" into a talk of mineral additions or lactobacillus fermentation.

What are some of the most popular, most talked-about breweries of the last few years? Off the top of my head: Hill Farmstead, Tired Hands, Prairie, Pipeworks, Alpine, Cigar City, Night Shift, the Alchemist, Sante Adarius, etc. etc. There's many many more — those are literally off the top of my head (I wear a cap in which I store little slips of paper, onto which I write the names of breweries that I see being discussed frequently on Twitter.) Do they make the occasional high-ABV beer, barrel-aged stout, or maybe some brews with fruit or spice additions? Some of them do, but I think they're mostly just known for good beer. Most of which, I would say, is pretty damn drinkable. Do they sometimes make hefty imperial stouts? Yeah, but alongside a whole range of other things. Do a few of those breweries make some of the most hyped IPAs in the world? They do — and they're not hyped because they're explosively boozy, but because they're insanely flavorful and drinkable. I have yet to meet a single person that doesn't enjoy a Hill Farmstead IPA, and in fact, I've converted quite a few new beer lovers through Shaun Hill's hoppy wizardy. Maybe that's why he's got the most talked-about brewery in the world right now — not because he's the most experimental out there, not because he caters to extremes, but because he doesn't cater. He just makes super enjoyable beer, both intensely flavorful and easily accessible, and everyone seems to just... get it. Pretty simple. Extreme quality and mass appeal aren't mutually exclusive.

Let's not let the middle class die. Beer can be interesting and unconventional while remaining drinkable and approachable. We'll keep arguing forever and ever what good beer is, what bad beer is, but why narrow it down unnecessarily? You should be able to identify a good beer without anyone telling you what's in it. And if good beer is truly good, and interesting, and keeps reinventing itself, eventually it won't seem extreme at all.

Can You Pinpoint the Moment Your Tastes in Beer Changed?

Ghosts convene around the 2012 batch of Allagash Ghoulschip, haunting it with spooky souring microbes.

When you like something a lot, and you find other people who also like that thing a lot, it's easy to create a basic sense of community. Beer happens to be an exceptionally easy thing to bond over, especially if you brew it, but sometimes you want to dive a little deeper into a conversation than just listing some beers you've drank. In any passionate group of 'enthusiasts,' it's easy to kick off a conversation by asking the basic: "How did you get into this?" question.

Many people develop their love of (obsession with) beer over time, but I firmly believe that beer inspires such devotion largely because it is an acquired taste. We all have some vague story about how we got into beer, but these anecdotes and personal histories can often be long and a little tedious — maybe more fun to ramble about in person. I could write a very long blog post (I mean, longer than usual) about how I first discovered craft beer. But for all those years of developing my palate, discovering new things, and switching style allegiances, one night in particular stands out to me as the moment my tastes in beer really changed — or maybe solidified.

This was a few years ago, sometime in October, I think. One particular detail kind of nails the timeframe, and adds a nice bit of semi-irony that is perhaps the entire reason I remember this particular evening so well. Me and a few good friends were out for some beer events in NYC, and our first stop brought us to Blind Tiger, a wonderful (if perpetually-packed) beer nerd haven in the West Village. I forget what the exact nature of the event was, but I think it may have been an Allagash tap takeover. In any case, me and my friends were all about the Allagash Ghoulschip, an extremely rare one-off sour pumpkin beer thingy. It was a killer beer, and everyone at the table agreed that this sour beer thing was pretty neat. I had had sour beers many times before, and am one of those people that was hooked after one taste, but it was around this night that I finally began to pinpoint the specific flavors and nuances that I enjoyed about them. You know that moment when you suddenly find yourself able to go beyond "I sure do enjoy the flavor of this!" to being able to talk about it in specific beerwords?

As we sipped our spooky sours, I glanced over at a table near the window and observed two gentleman who just gave off an air of "knowing about beer." (They must have had particularly illustrious beards.) While everyone else in the room was busy killing these rare kegs trotted down from Allagash, these guys were drinking beer out of a can. What first seemed like sheer madness soon clarified, slightly, when the BeerPulse-reading portion of my mind recalled the significance of the cans in their hands. It was a beer from Vermont called Heady Topper, and the brewery that made it had just been wiped out by devastating floods only a few weeks prior. The brewery just happened to have opened a separate canning facility around the same time, and thus survived as a production brewery making only a single canned beer. I remember thinking at the time: "What a crazy situation, I hope those guys can rebound. I think I've heard that beer is pretty good, too." While we briefly considered getting a can, we had other destinations in mind, and continued on our way. One of my friends went back to the next day to see if they still had any cans. They didn't. It would be another year or so before Vermont really took over the world, and the potent double-thread of Alchemist / Farmstead would have me dreaming of northern-bound roadtrips, along with everyone else on the East Coast.

But this remains, mostly, the night that I decided I was obsessed with all things sour and funky. After our goblets of Ghoulschip at the Blind Tiger, we headed to Brooklyn for a sour beer night at a bar called Mission Dolores. There were five or so Flanders Redish and Oud Bruinish beers on tap, and it was this massive acid punch to the tongue — following the already impressive Allagash stuff — that led me to conclude these sour beers might just be my favorite style. Flanders Reds in particular really get me with their unrivaled balance of sweet and sour, the insane complexity brought out with hints of cherry, vanilla and oak. Where previously I had tried sours only to forget their names the next day, that was the night I tried Cuvee des Jacobins Rogue and decided it could not be the last time I had such a beer. I would be watching tap lists closely from then on. For when you gaze long into the sour, the sour also gazes into you.

Editor's Note: Okay, perhaps these anecdotes don't make for the most interesting stories ever, and this was kind of boring. Later on, I found a dollar, just right on the sidewalk. It was crazy.

Anyhow, there's something satisfying to me about being able to trace interests and obsessions in such personal detail. How often do we actually know why we like what we like? How many of the things we love were found when we were young, and those particular moments — the sparks of interest that lead to a hobby, or even a career — lost over time? Brewing is a unique hobby in that most people don't or can't get into it until they are older, and have already discarded a dozen previous hobbies from youth. It's a recipe for a passion and a hobby unlike any other.

Am I the only one with these lame memories, or can you trace your own personal history of changing tastes?