According to my Blogger account, I had intended to write a post about the unstoppable rise of overhopped beer almost a decade ago, in September of 2013.
For some reason, I never got to it, but now's good time to talk about this trend just as it seems to be dying out. The winds have changed, and what would have been a prescient 2013 post will now just be me trying to keep some kind of momentum going on this blog!
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Way back in 2010, I went to Germany for the first time in a long time. It was a pretty difficult time in my life, but I had a great time in Göttingen, and was very fortunate that I was able to return to Germany for months on end during the subsequent summers.
It was here that I discovered that I really liked German beer. That is, I really liked lagers - I also liked wheat beers, but there is something wonderful about German lagers, and how I could drink so very very much of it and feel fine the next day, in a way that I'd never experienced in Canada.
I'll never forget the day I returned to Toronto, and went out to a local (unfortunately long gone) pub near my apartment with my parents and then young son. I ordered a Steamwhistle, which advertised itself as a pilsner and which up to that very moment, was a beer I quite liked.
As I took that first sip, I was taken aback by its sweetness and, for lack of a better way of saying this, how difficult it was to just knock it back. It's not a terrible beer, but it's no pilsner!
As I recently pointed out implicitly on this very blog, Canadians can be uh, parochial. Even in a big city like Toronto, there's a long-standing tolerance for mediocrity that I've always found really strange, especially when we have access to so many great cuisines and people with the cultural knowledge to prepare things well. People here have always seemed to equate paying a lot of money in a cool place to eat or drink something with eating or drinking something good.
Although my taste buds readjusted to the sweeter Canadian beers, what didn't change was my emerging hostility to hoppy ales. Which is why this article by Rick Ball in Guernica magazine spoke to me, although not enough to write about it at the time!
I'd encourage you to read it, but the short version is that the reason we were (and are still) awash in overhopped IPA is because they're easier to make, and what started as a kind of reaction to bland corporate beer, became the many headed hydra of going out and watching people pretend that something that tasted like floor cleaner was actually delightfully refreshing.
Even at the time, articles like Hoppy Beer is Awful were sounding the alarm bells, even if it was with the-then necessary cultural proviso that she also liked these terrible beers, they were just getting too hoppy.
Perhaps the apotheosis of this trend for me was the opening of Bellwoods Brewery in my old neighbourhood. It checked all the boxes - it had this "authentic" vibe while simultaneously being very expensive, and advertising how local and "authentic" it was, while clearly the result of a large amount of capital.
Nevertheless, everyone was raving about them so I thought I'd give them a try, and their beer was awful. I don't say this lightly - at the time I didn't really like IPAs but I could stomach them, but they had this one IPA with blood orange that was literally stomach turning.
Now to be fair to them, they've pivoted away from the hoppy beers to the sour ones. But at the time, I was genuinely perplexed to see the volume of people walking past my apartment carrying their smartly branded bottles. Did they really enjoy these beers? Or were they just chasing trends?
Why did I care about this so much? Probably because I drank a lot and so beer was on my mind! Now, I feel so distant from beer culture that I don't even really know what's popular anymore. What I do know is that a lot of breweries, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the easy-to-make IPA crowd, started trying to make nice German lagers again, and one can indeed find some good local beers that I don't want to use as a stain remover.
That being said, most bars and brewpubs here in Toronto at least are still extremely over saturated with IPAs, but at least now there's a small chance that there will be something I would like to drink, if I were to drink at all!
Even Bellwoods seems to have moved on - their most popular beer now is a sour, which again, coming from Germany, is something that both amuses me a depresses me! But the story of trying to get a glass of Berliner Weisse with syrup in Toronto is a story for another day!
