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Former home brewer and, for a short time, amateur beer judge here. You've got it right. It's not that more hops = better beer. It's that more hops = easier bee

Former home brewer and, for a short time, amateur beer judge here. You've got it right. It's not that more hops = better beer. It's that more hops = easier beer. Malt-forward beers are much more difficult to get right, and require a lot of very careful attention to detail. Hops are easy: Just throw them into the batch and set a timer. Their strong flavor is also useful for masking a lot of consistency problems and off-flavors that might stem from other, trickier parts of the brew process. The brewmaster of a new craft brewery is likely an amateur who recently went pro, and has very little practice brewing at an industrial scale. It's an over-crowded market right now, too, so they're operating on very tight margins and working with a clientele that can afford to be very picky. The days when one could get away with marketing something like Shiner Bock as a bock are long gone. So they can't afford to burn a lot of money working out why a recipe that yielded a perfect malt aroma at a 5 gallon batch size comes out flat and lifeless when scaled up to 30 barrels. They'd be out of business before they got it pinned down. Hops are easy, though, so the hoppy beer brewer is more likely to survive. I suspect that this effect continues on to packaging and distribution: Hoppy beers can handle some amount of oxidation where cream ales and lagers quickly start to taste like cardboard. That's useful in an overcrowded market where your beer might spend a few months sitting on a shelf before anyone drinks it. (Hopefully this becomes less of a thing as cans, which have a longer shelf life than bottles, increase in popularity.) And there's no way that your local TGI Bennihan's or the "537 beers on tap" bar is staying on top of cleaning their tap lines, but, again, hops can help mask the funk. It's also something of an open secret among beer judges that hoppy beers are at an unfair advantage to win the "best in show" prize. Because the final selection for that prize comes at the end of the day, after the judges' palates have been deadened by endless beer tasting, and hops are about the only flavor component that is as subjectively noticeable at the end of the show as it was in the morning. Any amateur brewer who's involved in the beer competition circuit is going to be influenced by that.

fizwhiz 7y ago
These are the kind of insightful comments I come to HN for! What a stark contrast against another comment lamenting that men get overly competitive/nerdy about their hobbies thus engaging in "mentrification" or whatever tf that is.
- jcims 7y ago
  Yeah it wasn’t till i got here that i remembered this thread was about beer.
jdpigeon 7y ago
Saw your comment after basically making the same point to the parent. You really nailed it, especially with regards to shelf life and scale. Thinking of it, all the times I remember being really knocked off my feet by a malt-forward beer was on draft at small scale breweries.
Cougher 7y ago
"The days when one could get away with marketing something like Shiner Bock as a bock are long gone." Can I look forward to the days when one can't get away with marketing American IPAs as IPAs? Because they're nothing like the British originals. I was also a homebrewer and a beer judge for a short time. That was back in the day (the 80s) when Pilsner Urquell was still the most bitter beer in the world. There was a stereotypical homebrewer who used to dump loads of hops in his beers as a sort of "hot sauce penis waver" to express his manliness. These guys paid no attention to beer style or brewing history. This mindset went on to have the dominant influence on the American microbrew industry, which has included varying degrees of misapplication of beer style claims. I've long given up on trying beer from American brewers as only a few of them use any degree of real creativity and understanding that malt does more than just provide color and something for yeast to create alcohol with. Unfortunately, the rise of microbrews inevitably brought the demise of imports, relatively speaking. I could get on board with the canned beer fad if the labels were even remotely readable, but like their overhopped beer, art and nuance is something that is wielded like a sledgehammer to clobber us over our heads.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  No, and there's not a strong historical basis for making the distinction, either - in the UK, the hop and grain bills for beers sold as IPAs have been in a constant state of flux for centuries now, and it wasn't all that long ago that an IPA coming from a London brewery could have been more bitter than a standard American IPA nowadays. If it's any consolation, at least in the classification system used by the BJCP style guidelines, they aren't even in the same general category. But one could argue that the names used in a beer judging rubric and the names used for the purposes of marketing beer are not, despite the use of some common language, the same thing. It's also, I think, not quite correct to blame the development of American IPA solely on machismo. That's undeniably a big part of it nowadays, but, when the style developed, it was much more about adapting the basic idea of an English IPA to taste good using the grain and hops that were being grown in North America. For a good (mostly British-focused) blog that covers some of this history in excruciating details, see Shut Up About Barclay Perkins.
  - 7y ago

fizwhiz 7y ago

These are the kind of insightful comments I come to HN for! What a stark contrast against another comment lamenting that men get overly competitive/nerdy about their hobbies thus engaging in "mentrification" or whatever tf that is.

jcims 7y ago
Yeah it wasn’t till i got here that i remembered this thread was about beer.

jdpigeon 7y ago

Saw your comment after basically making the same point to the parent. You really nailed it, especially with regards to shelf life and scale. Thinking of it, all the times I remember being really knocked off my feet by a malt-forward beer was on draft at small scale breweries.

Cougher 7y ago

"The days when one could get away with marketing something like Shiner Bock as a bock are long gone." Can I look forward to the days when one can't get away with marketing American IPAs as IPAs? Because they're nothing like the British originals. I was also a homebrewer and a beer judge for a short time. That was back in the day (the 80s) when Pilsner Urquell was still the most bitter beer in the world. There was a stereotypical homebrewer who used to dump loads of hops in his beers as a sort of "hot sauce penis waver" to express his manliness. These guys paid no attention to beer style or brewing history. This mindset went on to have the dominant influence on the American microbrew industry, which has included varying degrees of misapplication of beer style claims. I've long given up on trying beer from American brewers as only a few of them use any degree of real creativity and understanding that malt does more than just provide color and something for yeast to create alcohol with. Unfortunately, the rise of microbrews inevitably brought the demise of imports, relatively speaking. I could get on board with the canned beer fad if the labels were even remotely readable, but like their overhopped beer, art and nuance is something that is wielded like a sledgehammer to clobber us over our heads.

mumblemumble 7y ago
No, and there's not a strong historical basis for making the distinction, either - in the UK, the hop and grain bills for beers sold as IPAs have been in a constant state of flux for centuries now, and it wasn't all that long ago that an IPA coming from a London brewery could have been more bitter than a standard American IPA nowadays. If it's any consolation, at least in the classification system used by the BJCP style guidelines, they aren't even in the same general category. But one could argue that the names used in a beer judging rubric and the names used for the purposes of marketing beer are not, despite the use of some common language, the same thing. It's also, I think, not quite correct to blame the development of American IPA solely on machismo. That's undeniably a big part of it nowadays, but, when the style developed, it was much more about adapting the basic idea of an English IPA to taste good using the grain and hops that were being grown in North America. For a good (mostly British-focused) blog that covers some of this history in excruciating details, see Shut Up About Barclay Perkins.
- 7y ago