This past friday I was up at a buddy’s place here in Carneros and we opened a 22 ouncer of Sierra Nevada’s Hoptimum. This is SN’s “Imperial IPA” offering and a dandy of high alcohol and out of control hoppiness.
The beer is brewed with a heady dose of Magnum, Simcoe hops and other proprietary hop strains exclusive to the good brewery up in Chico. Hoptimum is a golden colored ale with a frothy head and an aggressive slap in the face of hop aromas. What stands it apart from other double IPA’s is a thick resiny finish that’s almost like sipping hop oil.
Not a brew to pound, the Hoptimum is a beer to sip while one reflects on how far American brewing has come.
But has the hop trend gone to far? While the standardized brewing guidelines for an Imperial IPA do allow for “high to absurdly high hop bitterness” it sometimes seems to me an ego contest between breweries to make the hoppiest brew on the market.
This has resulted in some fine beers, Pliny the Elder and Hop Stoopid being two examples. But while drinking a Hop Stoopid one evening I wondered if by trying to achieve the title of hoppiest brew, had American craft brewing begun to leave the rest of the beer loving public behind. For beverage nerds like myself and my friends a 22 ounce of high hoppy ale is an exciting tasting opportunity. For many other drinkers, something like the Hoptimum would likely be disgusting and not anything they would recognize as beer.
But as we have pushed the boundaries of hoppiness, in the high hops arms race so to speak, breweries have also improved overall quality, diversified the American beer scene and truly revolutionized what had once been a somewhat obscure British beer type, the India Pale Ale.
Had it not been for the original Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, that pushed the boundaries of hoppiness back when it was first released we would never have reached this point today at which we can begin to wonder if hoppiness has gone too far. So drink up you hop heads for it is those who continue to probe the limits of gravity, IBUs and hop clonal selection that continue to push American brewing forward.
I was very pleased to see this, as I found it by Googling “hoppiness has gone to far”. No, Google, I did not mean to search for, “happiness has gone too far”.
I started off as a drinker of whatever I could try at the British and Irish pubs here in Boston. When I discovered Sierra Nevada and, to a lesser extent, Anchor Steam, I was sold on bitter, hoppy brews. It was clean, pure and consistent, and the spicy bitterness was both refreshing and exciting. My palate, both with regards to food and beer, had matured past the salty/fatty/sweet portfolio, and I became fascinated with bitter, sour, hot, spicy and aromatic/floral scents and flavors.
As time went on, however, I became progressively more disenchanted with hoppy brews. EVERY microbrewery’s default beer seems to be an IPA and, whereas the early American IPA (original Sam Adams, Tremont, Harpoon, etc.) seemed to have a balanced flavor with regards to alcohol, maltiness, bitter hops, etc., the trend of late seems to have an emphasis on overwhelming hoppiness. I’m aware that different varietals of hops impart different flavors, but one must admit that they obscure, and even interfere with the presence of other, more subtle flavors when overdone. Since then, I’ve gone the complete other route in the past year, sipping floral and spicy Belgians, where hops make a minimal presence, and while I’ve begin to reacquire a taste for hoppy beers, I can’t help but feel that American microbrews have reached a zenith of hoppines. I honestly hope brewers and, for that matter, beer drinkers in general will begin to pull back from the one-upsmanship of overhopped beers and return to crafting beers with balanced, distinctive and recognizable flavor profiles. How many can you enjoy? An overhopped beer has an extraordinary zing, and kills your palate more or less right away.
Quite an eloquent take on the hoppiness situation. Perhaps as more sophisticated beer drinkers tire of the hop overload we’ll see more balanced, craft beers in the market.
For example, I just recently tried Grand Teton Brewing’s “Pursuit of Hoppiness” an Imperial Red Ale that a solid hop punch but with a strong enough malt backbone to provide a smooth balanced finish.