IPAs disgust me. I’ve never told anyone this before, for fear of being set upon by homebrewers, hopheads, and frat bros that’ve been totally numbed to reason by high-ABV swill. But I feel like I can trust you — yes, you — with my secret: At the merest hint of an India pale ale, I’m overcome with loathing so severe, it’s all I can do to resist smashing every tinted longneck in sight. I’m a wretched imposter, doomed to silently endure the world’s heinous praise for this “once and future” craft beer king, or else be laughed out of the liquor store. Heavy is the head that has a mouth that hates the brown… beer…. It all starts with that musty, grassy odor. People claim to love it, but that IPA stench hits my nose like a Christmas tree that drenched itself in expired Pine-Sol, then went out clubbing. You know that scene in Se7en, where Brad Pitt & Morgan Freeman find a rotting dude’s corpse covered in taxi-cab air fresheners? Spoiler alert: they do. Spoiled beer alert: IPAs smell like that, and yet somehow, they taste even worse.
I can relate. My heresy is that I’m truly an outlier in Beervana, a philistine incapable of appreciating the subtle differences between local microbreweries and their various and widely-acclaimed artisanal offer. Beer is generally lost on me; my idea of the Best Beer in the World © is Shiner Bock, which my wife derides as “Texas Bud Light.” Laugh all you want, but the intricacies and nuances of beer escape me. I have a friend who judges beer competitions (which seems like nothing if not a GREAT way to scam free beer), and he can and often does wax rhapsodic over a beer as if it was a ‘67 Bordeaux. He breatlessly discourses on topnotes and finishes, IBUs, and hops varietals as if they’re actually things…which to him they most certainly are. Me? Not so much.
That’s all well and good, but I can no more identify what makes beers different from one another than I can zero in on the subtle differences between Packers fans and abject evil. I’m a beer wuss living in Beervana, and discussions and comparisons of beers are lost on me. More than that, I HATE IPAs. Redolent of pond effluent, smelling like a junior high school boys’ locker room, and prone to assaulting my taste buds in a way I’ve always imagined battery acid would, IPAs to me are nothing but varying degrees of bitter, something I find exceedingly unpleasant.
If it’s bitter, why on Earth would I choose to drink it?
I was long ago stripped of any street cred I may have at one time possessed, but while I occasionally wish I liked and cared enough about beer to participate in lengthy, earnest, and learned dicusssions of hops, ABV, IBUs, and other beer-related topics, I got nothin’. On those rare occasions I’m in the mood for a beer, I’ll stick with my Shiner Bock, thank you very much.
This is why I’m usually counted on to be the designated driver…and I’m pretty OK with that.
