I think they may have upped the hoppiness/bitterness a bit to be more in line with modern palates, but overall it’s still pretty damn solid.
Maybe the IBUs are up but the aromatics seem diminished to me.
Well, our sense of taste diminishes as we age. Other explanations can be that the comparison pool is much different than 25 years ago, or that the novelty has simply worn off.
Ale or Saison please…
- 1000
what do you mean by “Ale”?
… and I’m with ya’ on Saisons — they rule!
I totally agree - it’s still a terrific beer. What is shocking to me is the Saga IPA from Summit - probably my favorite local IPA at the moment (that’s being bottled).
Summit’s “Saga” IPA is extremely good. I do prefer Surly’s “Overrated” and “Furious”, but not by a whole lot, really.
The beer advocate (79) & rate beer (65) ratings for Paleo reflect that it’s a mediocre IPA at best. reviewer comments include – doesn’t take like an IPA ; not much flavor. A bit of disagreement on the style. Not west coast, not east coast, maybe it’s a session ipa, maybe it’s british, …
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned here is the differences between British and American hops. I’m no expert, but I think the US hops tend to have a more aggressive profile (along with the fact that they are often used in more aggressive quantities). As noted, the IPA style has mutated over the years and that west coast definition of what an IPA is has now become the accepted norm.
Hop choices do make a big difference, but it’s a bit more complex than that:
British beer writer Martin Cornell’s blog http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/four-ipa-myths-that-need-to-be-stamped-out-for-ipaday/says the IPA style was not developed for British troops, I do not know of his sources for this statement.
'Myth 2: “IPAs started life as a British export to their troops stationed out in India back in the 1800s.”
Fact: Pale ale was around from at least the 17th century and pale ales were being exported to India from at least the 1780s, if not before. And they weren’t drunk by the troops, either those of the East India Company’s forces or the later British Army forces in India, who much preferred porter, and continued drinking porter in India right through to the end of the 19th century. The pale ales exported by Hodgson, Bass, Allsopp and others were drunk by the middle and upper classes among the Europeans in India, the military officers and the “civil servants”, the civilians who worked for the East India Company, trading, administrating and collecting taxes.’
Therein lies the reason I think the BA is a total joke. The paleo was a very good beer. To slam it because it does not live up to your expectations of what it should taste like- rather than rating the beer simply for what it is- is totally meaningless.
Unfortunately, we are not at a point where we can trust ANY ratings from The Beer Advocate and Ratebeer.com. It’s just a bunch of amateurs hailing their favorite beers rather than having any ability at all to break down styles and comment intelligently on them.
When I look up ratings for lagers, pilsners and lighter beers, usually the first thing you read is…“…it’s ok for a lager…” pretty much showing personal preference over knowledge of beer.
As someone who has worked with craft beers for almost 25 years, I can’t wait for the day that we have intelligent, professional critics actually rating beers and giving the masses a little bit of guidelines to go one.
Just look up the highest rated beers on Beer Advocate and Ratebeer.com and you will find them to be almost ALL Barleywines, triplebocks or Quadrupel IPAs.
Thomas, do you miss Michael Jackson?
The common theme among most of the top rated beers is lots of alcohol and hops and no consideration of balance.
This has been mentioned, but it sounds like by “traditional” they mean British style, which is the truly traditional style. I have never had an American IPA that I’ve enjoyed, and I have tried several of the most sought after. I would rather drink Heineken than Heady Topper. I do really like Meantime IPA, though. It’s not so over the top. The hop aromas are present and very noticable, but there isn’t the overwhelming bitterness that I get from every domestic one I’ve had. It sounds like I might like the one you’re talking about too.
In other words the " Parkerization " effect.
Cheers,
Bud
BA has lost all credibility. Lambics & American Wilds would likely top all ratings if enough were produced/accessible for enough people to rate them.
Thomas- I’m really curious- which beers exactly are being slighted? If Rick or Jack’s Abby aren’t handling the domestic lagers- I’ve found few that really know what they are doing, & the imported lagers & Pilsners are stale most, if not all of the time that they reach a retailer’s shelf & ultimately a consumer’s fridge. We have a small brewery- Chuckanut which makes amazing European-style Kolsch & Pilsner. They barely bottle it & kegs rarely go from Bellingham, Wa to Seattle. Those beers, IMO have to be fresher than fresh to appreciate the nuance & complexity that I think you are referring to. No online rating site will ever capture the spirit of those beers.
As far as what is an IPA? Any beer with an “extra” pale malt base with a late hop addition. The degrees of hops vary- those looking for only traditional English IPA will find their choices limited in 2014 in the U.S. Many Pale Ales taste like IPA- Zombie Dust, Furious, Fremont Summer, Pseudo Sue etc etc etc. Worrying about the style gets one nowhere fast. Drink styles you like. They are most likely all on the shelf, or a text or e-mail away via a trading partner.
OK, I have a couple of things to add. First off, you can’t talk about how a beer tasted “traditionally” when it has a several hundred year history, because beer styles, like fashions, change. So when people talk about how a style was “traditionally” brewed, you have to ask them what time period they mean. 19th century and mid-20th century IPA’s are different animals. 21st examples are also completely different and IPA has changed dramatically in the last 10 years (I’ve heard someone argue that we’re in the midst of a change right now where alcohol is dropping by 1-2% and IBU’s are dropping in favor of more finish and aroma hops). Modern IPA’s are their own style and bear virtually no resemblance to historical IPA’s according to people like Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell who are beer historians who use source materials (like brewer’s logs) for their conclusions.
Second, the whole things about adding extra hops because the beer being shipped to India was going bad thing isn’t completely true. All export beers, whether to India, the Caribbean, Baltic countries, etc had heavier hop additions. Sometimes as high as double the domestic version. It wasn’t just pale ale that got hopped heavily. A shit ton of porter was shipped to India in the 19th century as well and it too was heavily hopped (again close to double the rate for domestic consumption). England was always heavily class conscious and the beers you drank were somewhat dependent on your class. Pale Ales in the early 19th century were drunk by the middle class. The working class people like soldiers, primarily drank porter. So pales ales for India were primarily drunk by officers and administrators while soldiers drank porter (hence why they shipped so much porter to India even though no one carries on about it today). As for IBU ranges of 35-40 IBU’s, Ron Pattinson shows some recipes from the mid-19th century that were hopped at a rate of 5-8 lbs per UK barrel, which would put them well over 100 IBU’s since almost all hops were used for the boil and not jsut for aroma. 1858 Wm Younger XXP IPA was 5lb/barrel and had an ABV of 5.7% and a starting gravity of 1.059. That would be like making a five gallon homebrew batch with 11-12 oz of hops and using almost all of them for the boil because those dudes didn’t do hop bursting or finish hops.
Pale ale and IPA were often used interchangeably for the same beer during the same time period. The idea that IPA was markedly different than pale ale is a modern idea. Often times a brewery sold the same beer as IPA in one market and sold it as pale ale in another. Sometimes the draft version was one thing and the bottled version the other. But the idea that we have that they’re distinctly different beers isn’t completely true. Nor is the idea that they were always malty and balanced since a lot of them used a mix of US 6 row and UK 2 row barley and sugar. The whole crystal malt thing is a mid-late 20th century thing. The super aromatic hop thing is recent too. A lot of older recipes I’ve seen (I’ll give sources later) don’t have dramatic amounts of finishing hops.
So where does that leave us in defining IPA? Modern IPA (I guess you could call it craft IPA) is really its own style and other than the name doesn’t bear much resemblance to any historic period of IPA. Craft brewers took the name, distorted the history to suite their own ideas, and made a new style of beer which is what a lot of the old school craft beers are (like Bridgeport). Then (to borrow a phrase) we had the “arms raise” period where you couldn’t have enough alcohol or bitterness. But now people seem to be backing off the IBU’s and alcohol and we’re entering the period where you can’t have enough hop aroma. Bottom line is that beers called IPA, like all styles, have never been static and will continue to change, so in another 10 years they’ll be different than now.
Two Ron Pattinson quotes:
“So what makes a beer an IPA? It’s as impossible to define definitively as the difference between Porter and Stout or what makes a beer Mild Ale. Why? Because the definitions have varied so much over time and place that coming up with a single one that covers every IPA can’t be done in any meaningful way. You’d end up with something like this: a pale beer between 1030 and 1080. I think that just about covers every IPA ever brewed (excluding Black IPA). Anything more specific and it would no longer be generally applicable.”
“Lacking style guidelines to guide them, Victorian brewers soon started confusing things. Sometimes they’d call a beer IPA, others Pale Ale. When a brewer made beers called both, the IPA might be the stronger, or it might be the PA. Like I said, there were no rules.”
Sources (because everything I said someone else has said first):
Ron Pattinon’s blog “Shut Up About Barclay Perkins” http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/
He’s got a ton of books too, but this one has some recipes for historic beers including IPA: The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer: Rediscovered Recipes for Classic Brews Dating from 1800 to 1965.
Martyn Cornell’s blog: http://zythophile.wordpress.com/
Also get his book Amber Gold and Black if you want an awesome and historically accurate history of English beer.
IPA myths debunked: Four IPA myths that need to be stamped out for #IPAday – Zythophile