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Comment by SirFatty | Hacker News Reader

who? what?

huge caveat: I haven't read the piece yet, but had to quickly respond to you. This is probably totally inside baseball for beer snobs. For me, Heady Topper is the beer that made me a beer snob. Never understood why anyone would ever stand in line to buy beer but sadly now I do.

The most interesting aspect of their story is that it seems to somewhat defy market gravity...they keep their prices pretty steady (very expensive), supply is limited, and demand keeps growing. I'm no historian or expert but I think they've been a market creator in this style of recipe (Lawsons, Hill Farmstead, Trillium, Fiddlehead, etc). That might be wildly inaccurate, so take it for what it's worth.

Again, haven't the read the piece but had to respond.

Think Pliny the Younger, but earlier in the hype cycle.

If it's as good as Pliny, I might go out of my way to get some!

Couple notes:

1) I don't know where you are, but it's best drunk fresh - I wouldn't recommend paying or trading a lot to get some if you're far away and can't be sure of the provenance (e.g. a month old can that has been improperly refrigerated is not going to be good)

2) It's "like" Pliny in that they are both hoppy double or triple IPAs but still different - Heady isn't filtered, so it doesn't have as clean of a mouthfeel (not necessarily good or bad; just different). You get a bit more of a piney vibe as well as more tropical fruit with Heady in my opinion.

The only time I've had it was flown in for a party. It was really lovely, though.

Never heard of this on the west coast. You mean there is beer made east of the beerocracy states of Washington & Oregon? At least the hops must come from here, right :-)

I wish it was available around here, but the legally required liquor industry beer industry middlemen have too much power in what gets imported. In the Seattle area there are dozens of brewerys in the city, plus zillions in surrounding areas. There are so many it's virtually impossible to have visited all of them, much less heard of them.

Ohhhh man. You have no idea what you're missing out on. There is great beer all across the US. We get some beers from Washington and Oregon and California (Rouge and Stone come to mind immediately), but there are a ton of beers from the East Coast and the Great Lakes that are beyond fantastic. Check em out sometime!

The northeast is a beer mecca. You have great beer on the west coast but there is beer just as good if not better here. A lot of hop farms are in Pennsylvania and the New England states now.

Many states have great local beers these days. Here in the Twin Cities metro, we have some world-class beers that are as good as anything I've had... Surly Furious, Lift Bridge Farm Girl, Indeed LSD, Sidhe Greenman's Harvest, and the late great Harriet Divine Oculist (Harriet recently closed, sigh).

Whenever I'm traveling, I go out of my way to try the local beers, relying on recommendations from bartenders and local friends. It's always a great experience.

Some years ago, I was at a conference in San Francisco, attended by numerous Europeans. The vendor poured a lot of Anchor Steam beer into us. Some of the Europeans were shocked at how good it was. The only American beers they'd ever had were Bud and Miller Lite, and they thought American beer was awful, until they tried Anchor. I kept telling them we keep the best stuff for ourselves. In practice, that's true even of individual states.

If you like beer, New England is worth a tour.

http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2016/01/22/new-england-craft-b...

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