Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're telling me. I've been into craft beer for around 8 years, a bit after IPAs really took off in the US. I have acid reflux, and nothing triggers it more consistently and quickly than having an IPA. It just tastes like straight up acid to me. I equate people who like really strong IPAs to people who are into extreme hot sauce just for the sake of injuring themselves with something that's overly hot. Is there real…
> Is there really any flavor to IPAs with IBUs that are through the roof? No, not at all. Yes, there is good, tasty flavor to hops, provided you're not on the sensitive side of the bitter tasting spectrum. The bitter flavor overwhelms everything for some, but not all. If you're curious, there are bitter tasting test strips like these which not everyone is sensitive to. https://www.amazon.com/Nasco-PTC-Paper-Strips-Vi…
I'd also add "provided you didn't boil the shit out of them, destroying the essential oils and isomerizing the alpha acids". Generally speaking, a particular batch of hops can add either bitterness or flavor but not both. If you want both, you add multiple batches.
A little rundown of the chemicals in hops and how they affect the beer depending on how you add it.
Hops contain three things:
- Alpha acids. They're tasteless on their own, and when you boil them, they isomerize, and isomerized alpha acids taste bitter. All the bitterness in hoppy beers come from these.
- Beta acids. People don't talk about these much. They're generally associated with off flavors, and most cultivars try to minimize them.
- Essential oils. This is where the real flavors in hops come from. Different cultivars contain different essential oils that give off different flavors. European hops tend to have earthy, floral, and spicy flavors ("spicy" as in traditional European spices, e.g. allspice, not "spicy" as in chile peppers), and American hops lean towards pine and citrus flavors. Some newer American cultivars go past just "citrus" and into a wider variety of stone fruits; these tend to form the base of New England IPAs. Unfortunately, boiling the hops destroys much of the essential oils, so any hop you use for bittering will provide little flavor.
Different cultivars of hops provide these in different amounts. Hops that are high in alpha acids but low in essential oils are called "bittering hops" because all they're good for is adding them during the boil to add bitterness. Hops that are high in essential oils but low in alpha acids are called "aroma hops" because all they're good for is to add them later in the process to add aroma and flavor to the beer.
There are basically three points where you can add hops into the beer:
- At the beginning of the boil. This thoroughly isomerizes the alpha acids and destroys much of the essential oils, contributing bitterness but little flavor. If you want a bitter beer, throw a bunch of high-alpha hops in at this stage. If you don't like bitterness, just throw in enough hops to protect the beer from spoilage.
- Later in the boil. This contributes a small amount of bitterness and a decent amount of flavor. Unless the beer is _packed_ with hop flavor, you can expect much of the hop flavor to come from this stage.
- After the boil is over. This is called "dry-hopping". This contributes no bitterness whatsoever and adds a ton of flavor, provided you use hops that have a large amount of essential oils. Beers that have intense hop flavors make extensive use of dry-hopping. Extreme west-coast IPAs tend to make heavy use of both hopping during the boil and dry-hopping, thus providing strong bitterness and flavor. New England IPAs, on the other hand, rely almost entirely on dry-hopping to bring out every nuance of the essential oils, to the point where a new marketing term has been coined: "double dry-hopped", or DDH. It doesn't really mean anything, there's no official threshold for what counts as "double", but you can safely assume that any beer marketed as a DDHIPA is going to be packed with hop flavor thanks to extensive dry-hopping. While there are a few west coast DDHIPAs, most beers labelled as DDHIPA are New England-style, where dry-hopping is especially important. In those beers, the H does double duty and also stands for "hazy". Why? Because when you aggressively dry-hop a beer, hop particles will actually become suspended in the drink giving it a cloudy appearance. You can filter them out if you want to, but New England-style IPAs almost never do so because they've turned the haze into a selling point (west coast IPAs, on the other hand, almost always filter them), which is why most of us who drink them just call them "hazies".
tl;dr If you think you don't like hops because they're too bitter, go find something that's aggressively dry-hopped with very little hops being added during the boil. You'll find out that hops actually taste pretty good and that what you didn't like was just the effect of boiling them.