Craft Beer Fest 2013 - (IPA rant)

http://danmurphys.com.au/dm/search/...Hash=95bc221e7324b6d99ad7585dcb75d319dbe51a63

 

I love a hoppy beer. I love IPA's. One of the reasons I think hoppy beers are popular among home or small batch brewers is because the strong hops flavor hides some of the imperfections of the beer.

 

While this is true of most people's taste perception, a qualified BJCP judge will find a needle of diacetyl underneath a haystack of hops.

To make a 5 gallon batch really quite bitter only needs say, 3-4oz of hops. With a pound being under $20, it's very cheap to make your beers insanely hoppy. A popular method of brewing here is the "10 Minute IPA", whereby the only hop addition is with ten minutes in the boil remaining ... but it's massive. This means a lot of the hop flavour is retained while still reaching the target bitterness.

 

it is better than crap fairs (craft fairs)
it is a place for dad band blues bands to play, wear hotrod shirts and the shirts of the island.. designer cargo shorts and ball player sunglasses....

all the other 'old guy fantasy' hobbies are there... bbq, hot sauces... blah blah... and people have fun...

have at it... it isn't something I get excited about, but those aren't my hobbies either..

 

I went to a Beer Dabbler in January. It just ok...and very cold! There were a ton of vendors and yeah, you get the little taster cup. It was like $40. The lines were long and it was horribly disorganized. The port-o-potties were 40 people deep in lines; vendors ran out of beer at various times and it was hipster central.
You won't be getting hammered at these events- the glasses are 3oz and the wait between beers was awful.
I found some beers I like, but won't ever be going to one of these things again.

 

Yep, so many small breweries just go nuts with the hops and their beers are horrible.

There is/was (?) a brewery in the Sacramento area called Hoppy Face. Every one of their beers was hopped to heck and back. Gag, I hated them all.

Lagunitas has a brew called Wilco Tango Foxtrot Recovery Ale. It is described as "malty and robust". I thought, cool, a good malty beer. It was hoppy as heck.

Oh well, to each their own, if bitter beer is your thing, more power to ya.

 

As was mentioned by others, the portions are small. If I'm "tasting" a beer, I taste it. Then, if I like it I share it with whoever I'm with. If I don't like it I offer it to someone else but I'm not gonna finish it off regardless. Realistically, it's more like doing "beer shots" than it is like "drinking a dozen beers."

Of course, once I find a few I like I'm probably gonna drink them.

As far as the wine folks spitting while the beer folks don't - wine has a lot more alcohol in it. I imagine you kinda have to spit it out if you don't want to get snockered quickly. Beer not so much.

Yeah - I like my beers kinda "chewy." Stouts and porters are where it's at for me.

Yikes. I wouldn't go that far; I'd probably just stop drinking. Wine is really wasted on me. If I want to drink a wine and actually like it, there's a better chance of that happening with Boone's Farm or Mad Dog than with something "good." It all just tastes like "wine" to me.

My wife was trying to "learn" her way around wine tasting for a while, but she finally came to the conclusion that she just couldn't "get" it. Then she tried a Scotch or two - and a lightbulb came on. She was tasting all the different things in the Scotch that all her wine-tasting friends were citing in the wine (but she couldn't figure out where they were getting them). Since then, she's been happily making her way through the beers and whisk(e)ys that she previously wouldn't deign to try.

Speaking of which - my wife found this a couple days ago; I laughed a lot.

Wine Tasting is BS - Here's Why

 

Interesting article on the over-hoppy trend:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/2013/05/hoppy_beer_is_awful_or_at_least_its_bitterness_is_ruining_craft_beer_s_reputation.single.html

 

Not the choice of everyone (IPA).

There's so many other ale choices in the USA craft beer world. Let's revisit this topic in 5-10 years, and see where the explosion of beer offerings is trending at that time.

A wide variety of IPA choices is here to stay, and other beer trends will continue to surface, or grow.

 

Excellent article. Said what I said in my first post in this thread much more eloquently.

 

Ha, I liked that article and there's certainly some truth there. I don't consider myself a 'connoiseur' (sp?) but I do like red wine. I'm able to find a lot that I like in the $10-15 range. None of it is Boone's Farm or Mad Dog by the way. Those aren't wines; they are some variation of cough syrup.