The Novelty Trap
I cooled my jets on the trails near and pubs within Astoria, Oregon on a surprisingly sunny couple days this past weekend. One of those pubs was Fort George’s, where they are now pouring various test batches of the future 3-Way IPA. (This year they are collaborating with Alvarado Street and Ravenna.) Batch two, a West Coast version, was punchy and boozy but otherwise fairly nondescript. Batch three was a hazy with less alcohol (6.4%, maybe a percent less than v2) and juicy, with a decided mango top note. Unfortunately, it also had a bit too much cantaloupe for my taste. Nice, but nothing I’d feel compelled to post on Insta.
Version four, however—you can see it there at the top of the post—now that is a beer I’ll remember. It was even less boozy (6.1%) and the mangoes were dialed up a half a notch. Instead of melon, the complimentary note was mandarin, and boy did that work. Fort George typically makes a balanced hazy, drier, with a bit of kettle bitterness, and this had those qualities as well. It was a focused, intentional beer and in fact did earn a spot on the Instagram feed.
There’s a lesson in all of this, and an increasingly important one: it takes time to dial in a beer, and many—IPAs especially—suffer from entering the market as beta projects.
The Novelty Trap
I am not insensitive to the realities of the marketplace. People love shiny new things. If they visit a taproom and see a new IPA with a bunch of scrumptious adjectives trailing along (passion fruit!, vanilla!, papaya!, orange blossom!, strawberry!), they’re goners. In order to sustain customer interest, breweries have to spin out dozens of new beers each year. Breweries are happy to oblige, in part because the dazzling variety of techniques, hop varieties, and hop products means literally endless possibilities.* And that’s before you throw in the possibilities of different yeasts—what about special thiol yeasts?!—malts, strengths, attenuations, opacities. The list goes on and on.
There’s a downside to all these possibilities, though. Every time you fiddle with a new variable, you introduce uncertainty. Nectaron and Mosaic sound awesome, but how well do they play together, really? Should the Nectaron go in the whirlpool and dry hopping, or just one of those? Or the other? American brewers have gotten really, really good at intuitively understanding these interactions. Given how many potential ways things could go sideways, they do a fantastic job of putting out clean, well-made beer even when they’re just guessing about how a particular ingredient will play with others. And of course, experimentation yields important insights. If breweries didn’t experiment, they wouldn’t be practicing the alchemy that leads to certain wonderful flavors. But in the main, a one-off beer usually tastes, well, off. The delicious-sounding description may be accurate to a point, but way too often I find myself behind an unfocused pint that is less than the sum of its adjectives.
This is where the “trap” comes in. If brewers are forever feeding the beast of novelty, they’re never getting to refine and improve these beers. One of the reasons the annual 3-Way has such a high batting average is precisely because the beer goes through stages of refinement. If three breweries sat around for an afternoon spitballing ideas and then brewed up a single batch of beer, it wouldn’t have achieved the legendary status 3-Way has. People might find the concept interesting, but most years the beer wouldn’t be.
My Kingdom For a Refined IPA
In the tweet that inspired this rumination, Doug Veliky asked about what we wanted next in our IPAs. The tweet appeared just after my beta-version four epiphany, and I saw clearly that I don’t actually care what kind of IPA a brewery makes. The type is way less important than the execution.** When Patrick and I did our IPA Smackdown! last year, we threw a bunch of different kinds of IPAs into the hopper. It’s not hard to distinguish a focused, interesting beer from a muddled one—and the chasm is far greater than between two well-made IPAs of different types. A session IPA, double IPA, flavored IPA?—bring ‘em on, but dial them in first.
As I was finishing up this post, I saw Ruvani de Silvia’s piece in the Houston Chronicle about the popularity of fruit sours in H-town, including this eye-popper: “With more than 265 fruited sours in its repertoire, Urban South HTX is at the forefront of this city-wide trend…” 265 sours! I’ve never had a beer from Urban South, but that seems like a lot to manage.
Everything is cyclical. At one time, breweries were laser-focused on flagships. Thanks to a variety of factors, including social media and Untappd, promiscuity and FOMO mark this era. I am just but a simple country blogger, but count me among those hoping for a return to more focus and refinement and less novelty.
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* I know this is math/grammar pedant catnip. You’re all racing to point out that it’s not literally endless, because in fact there are finite numbers of variables. But are there? There are finite numbers of notes, and yet we still have new songs every year. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
** Black IPAs excepted. Obviously.