So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery (2014)
drinks.seriouseats.com
drinks.seriouseats.com
It was interesting 7-8 years ago. Now it's just "oh here we go again".
I have a personal theory that the overwhelming aroma and taste of hops in a beer can be used to mask many errors and missteps in the brewing process, which might be more easily tasted by the customer if it were, for example, a weissbier.
Pretty much all of my favourite beers come from Latvia. I haven’t tasted much better than I did out there.
But I have to say that there are some Estonian breweries that are really world-class, especially Põhjala and Pühaste made some of my favorite beers ever.
I'm increasingly suspicious that (typically) high relative ABV of high-IBU beers is a significant factor in influencing consumer choice, perhaps moreso than hops enthusiasts would like to admit.
(see the Alcohol By Volume graph).
I'd love to see data on sales of beer in relation to ABV though.
I feel your comment about the "token" stout; I used to go to the Refuge (https://www.refugesc.com/) quite often but one of the reasons I stopped is because their beer list is so overwhelmingly Belgian and I just want a regular stout or porter now and again.
The beer of northern New England is mostly driven by what tourists from Boston and NYC (more for Vermont than the other two) will shell out $10 for and a great many of those people want an IPA that you can patch the road with so that's what gets brewed. I can't comment on what things were like 10+yr ago since I wasn't paying attention to beer then.
Bingo. It's to the point now where OG craft breweries are faced with cutting their once staple lines to replace them with IPAs. IPAs represent 26% of the craft beer market and its still growing.
IPAs may have originally flooded the craft beer market because they are easier to brew consistently and keep longer on the shelf. But they've rocketed to the top of the beer sales charts because the people who buy beer love hops.
People have been talking about the "next IPA" for years now. Yet there's no indication that another style is going to usurp them. In fact, it's somewhat the opposite, as other styles are being adapted into IPAs. Nobody has made a heffeweizen IPA yet, so I think there's still further to go.
Even with a relatively interesting scene, my feeling is that beer has lost a certain amount of novelty and glamour around here. Bars are less central to young people's dating lives. It's more novel/fashionable to be a connoisseur of cocktails or marijuana strains. People are more healthy-oriented than ever, and beer is one of the more calorie-heavy ways of getting a buzz.
There are more breweries learning how to do good lagers but still few and far between.
I've been to both, and while Portland Maine has a surprising number of breweries for its size, Portland Oregon had way more. A quick google search confirms Portland OR has more than twice as many as Portland ME.
If you include the Portland OR metro area, it has more breweries than the entire state of Maine.
That may be but Portland, Oregon has some excellent cider as well. Belmont Station in Hollywood is pretty much my go to place, they've a diverse selection of beer and cider.
To be clear Belmont Station has both a bar (biercafé in hipster speak) and a store. The store has a really great selection of both beer and cider. My favorite is Reverand Nat's sour cherry — self-described as more of a lambic beer than a cider.
Their selection of California stuff isn't quite up to snuff but they carry 2 Towns as well — a friend had explain that reference 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 really any flavor to IPAs with IBUs that are through the roof? No, not at all.
I'm glad on the east coast I have a variety of beer to choose from that aren't IPAs
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-Vial/dp/B001D7...
The cider-y taste ("green-apple character" I believe) you can taste in the Belgian beer Orval is considered an off-flavor in IPAs and I'm pretty it was reasonably common high hop beers in the 90s and early 2000s.
Indeed, my suspicion is that homebrewing first create a wide variety of flavors and approaches through accidents but once the machinery for determining the correct flavors became established, small brewers followed with beers that has nothing strange or unusual at all and so could only distinguished by their hop-levels.
Worth noting that the citrusy highly carbonated brews are 'American IPA's, English or 'Imperial' IPAs are much less citrusy, if at all, and much much much less carbonated.
That's changing a bit - much to my disappointment, I don't like the citrus either, much less the high carbonation - with the craftier 'craft' beers, but generally they will market themselves as American IPAs, or have a citrusy name or label, so you can make your choice accordingly.
I think the unspecified IPA you often find will be American. And jeesh, there far too many of them. Like the original cheap American lager form, it's OK 'till you've had far too much of it and then you never want it again.
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.
In my experience, heavy dry-hopping contributes noticeable bitterness. If you have access to hops this is easy enough to confirm: get some lightly hopped beer, add a lot of hops (heavily hopped New England style IPAs can use 1oz/gal or more for dry hopping), and let it sit for a few days. After you've strained the hops out you should be able to taste the extra bitterness in the beer. A quick web search found this blog post with some explanation:
https://www.beervanablog.com/beervana/2017/4/17/yes-dry-hopp...
Yes. Yes there is. As someone with acid reflux, I can't stand spicy foods but love IPAs.
For me it is to opposite, I have no problem with IPA and want them as hoppy as they get. But some pilsners triggers the reflux consistently. I think for me it is related to how carbonated they are.
I'm glad we now have a good selection and can select what we want, and not having it as it was 10+ years ago where we had 5-10 types of pilsners/light lagers to select from
It's not just your personal theory! It's absolutely correct. In my neophyte brewing years if something came out bad, I'd just chuck more hops in the carboy and call it an IPA (back when it was rare and unusual).
It's also arguably not very good for men. Hops are fairly estrogenic. Might help with post-menopausal bone density though! https://www.naturalmedicinejournal.com/journal/2010-04/beer-...
Phytoestrogens don't really work on humans though. They mostly just antagonize the estrogen receptor, which means they bind to the receptor without activating it. This means they can actually be harmful to women on HRT because they make the HRT less effective.
I don't know if it's comparable, but my understanding is that over time caffeine's binding to adenosine receptors causes more receptors to be produced, leading to increased sensitivity to adenosine and so you get more drowsy than you otherwise would when caffeine's not present.
If that same effect applies to estrogen receptors, that would make men more sensitive to estrogen?
https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/120078-hops-and-women-8...
After home brewing, I have never had a bad batch. I just use soap and water to clean. Maybe it’s the risk of losing 600 gallons instead of 6. Some of the lambics are exposed to open field air (the one with the monk on the front). Is the cleanliness overblown?
- Americans don’t really get exposed to good lagers and pilseners. We get Bud[1], not Budvar. So there’s no expectation that beers in those categories could possibly be “good”. IPAs don’t have the same baggage.
- For the same reason, it’s easier to differentiate from the big brands on a supermarket shelf. You get to be your own category, not just the more expensive version of what people think of as regular beer.
- Maximalist American food culture. It’s like when bacon became a meme and suddenly everything was covered in bacon. Fatty ramen became a trend for the same reason: it’s a simple, super-saturated flavor that’s easy to crank up to 11.
- Like you mention, it’s easier to brew.
The worst is when you’re given a menu of 40 indistinguishable IPAs all called like “HOPULATOR 9000” or whatever. Sometimes I just want to go out for a brewski, why did that have to get complicated?
[1]You know what? Bud on draft is fine. It’s not the best, but I like it, and I’ll certainly take a $3 pint of bud over a $9 snifter of “gnarly Steve’s surfs up mango hop smasher” or whatever.
Oh man, was with you till the very end. Most places will have something on tap that qualifies as real beer. PBR, Yuengling, Stella, and Pilsner Urquell are all great lagers. Confronted with 40 taps of HOPULUS PRIME (or whatever), I'll happily swill them all day in a non-ironic, non-cheapskate, non-hipster fashion. But rice adjuncts? No thank you.
I think bud actually only uses rice and 6-row (i.e. old-style, harder to convert) barley. I could be mistaken about that, though.
At any rate, the adjunct grains used in US "megabrews" aren't just there because they're cheaper than barley. They're very much a part of the flavor profile, and a big part of the style. Whether or not you consider that a positive is personal preference, but they're not bad beers at all.
My problem with Bud is it doesn’t have much flavor or character for a pilsner - especially the Lite. Carbonated malt pop.
On the flavor part, I agree. I prefer Miller if we're going with the big breweries. Doesn't make it a bad beer, though, just a lighter profile.
Pretty much every major craft brewery nowadays has a high-quality pale session beer. Sometimes it's a pilsner (both Euro style and American pre-Prohibition style), sometimes it's a golden ale, and sometimes it's a Kölsch, and hell I've even seen one brewery with a Dortmund-style lager, but regardless of which it is, they're typically among the brewery's top sellers.
They're not the sexy beers that grab headlines, but they're actually the ones doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the brewery's bottom line.
Ten years ago, you would have been absolutely right, but pale session beers have come back in a huge way, and we now have no shortage of them. They exist, they're high-quality, and they sell, but you don't see people talking about them much because there's just not much to talk about. It's the beer you order multiples of when you're hanging out with your friends and don't want to get too full or too drunk too fast, and there's nothing particularly _interesting_ about that.
Ehhh, I wouldn't necessarily put "fatty" ramen in that position.
Legitimate ramen from Japan's original, basic purpose was food that could be eaten quickly by salarymen late at night/on their way home after work/drinking.
There's huge variety in ramen, and I think the fattier ones were made for a purpose too. Not just flavor, though that definitely is a result as well, but also because of the kind of environment there was in Japan, where the people there wanted something a bit heavier in flavor in a hot bowl on cold nights.
I've talked to many brewers and they said they would love to make more pales and lagers and sessions but that they don't sell.
This is exactly it. An IPA is much more forgiving to lackluster consistency of material inputs and process control making it a perfect match for small operators that don't have those things dialed in yet (or can't afford to dial them in)
As another commenter here posted, I think a lot of people formed an identity to it. As the person who likes craft beer and ipas were the king of craft beer. Now I just find them too much.
Funny thing happened to me, my friend said he liked ipas so I would always get them for him, he always said I knew what he liked. Years later he told me he actually hated ipas but wanted to seem like he liked them and eventually did.
Heck, I live in a small rust belt town of 2,000 people and we even have a brewery dedicated to sours alone. Travel 20 minutes up the road to the next town over, with a population of not even 1,000 people, and you'll come across a major – as in their production capacity is pushing the limits of what can be reasonably considered craft – craft brewery. Although not necessarily always available, they have 35 beers in their catalog. I'm not sure any of them resemble the west coast-style IPA we're talking about. If you include hazy, milkshake, etc. takes on IPAs then 9 of the 35 are considered IPAs. Still not a lot of emphasis on IPAs in general.
As an aside, this "rural" craft beer industry is rather interesting. The primary business model seems to be set up production where operations is cheap and then ship the product into the city. That sour brewery is basically a tech company, selling the vast majority of their beer online. Although that major craft brewery I spoke of does put a lot of effort into beer tourism, attracting people to their facilities, as well.
I think there is something to this. the same happens to other foods too. Just make them extremely spicy, cheesy or sweet and you don’t have to worry about taste subtleties anymore.
You've got it right. It's not that more hops = better beer. It's that more hops = easier beer. Malt-forward beers are much more difficult to get right, and require a lot of very careful attention to detail. Hops are easy: Just throw them into the batch and set a timer. Their strong flavor is also useful for masking a lot of consistency problems and off-flavors that might stem from other, trickier parts of the brew process.
The brewmaster of a new craft brewery is likely an amateur who recently went pro, and has very little practice brewing at an industrial scale. It's an over-crowded market right now, too, so they're operating on very tight margins and working with a clientele that can afford to be very picky. The days when one could get away with marketing something like Shiner Bock as a bock are long gone. So they can't afford to burn a lot of money working out why a recipe that yielded a perfect malt aroma at a 5 gallon batch size comes out flat and lifeless when scaled up to 30 barrels. They'd be out of business before they got it pinned down. Hops are easy, though, so the hoppy beer brewer is more likely to survive.
I suspect that this effect continues on to packaging and distribution: Hoppy beers can handle some amount of oxidation where cream ales and lagers quickly start to taste like cardboard. That's useful in an overcrowded market where your beer might spend a few months sitting on a shelf before anyone drinks it. (Hopefully this becomes less of a thing as cans, which have a longer shelf life than bottles, increase in popularity.) And there's no way that your local TGI Bennihan's or the "537 beers on tap" bar is staying on top of cleaning their tap lines, but, again, hops can help mask the funk.
It's also something of an open secret among beer judges that hoppy beers are at an unfair advantage to win the "best in show" prize. Because the final selection for that prize comes at the end of the day, after the judges' palates have been deadened by endless beer tasting, and hops are about the only flavor component that is as subjectively noticeable at the end of the show as it was in the morning. Any amateur brewer who's involved in the beer competition circuit is going to be influenced by that.
Thinking of it, all the times I remember being really knocked off my feet by a malt-forward beer was on draft at small scale breweries.
Can I look forward to the days when one can't get away with marketing American IPAs as IPAs? Because they're nothing like the British originals. I was also a homebrewer and a beer judge for a short time. That was back in the day (the 80s) when Pilsner Urquell was still the most bitter beer in the world. There was a stereotypical homebrewer who used to dump loads of hops in his beers as a sort of "hot sauce penis waver" to express his manliness. These guys paid no attention to beer style or brewing history. This mindset went on to have the dominant influence on the American microbrew industry, which has included varying degrees of misapplication of beer style claims. I've long given up on trying beer from American brewers as only a few of them use any degree of real creativity and understanding that malt does more than just provide color and something for yeast to create alcohol with. Unfortunately, the rise of microbrews inevitably brought the demise of imports, relatively speaking. I could get on board with the canned beer fad if the labels were even remotely readable, but like their overhopped beer, art and nuance is something that is wielded like a sledgehammer to clobber us over our heads.
If it's any consolation, at least in the classification system used by the BJCP style guidelines, they aren't even in the same general category. But one could argue that the names used in a beer judging rubric and the names used for the purposes of marketing beer are not, despite the use of some common language, the same thing.
It's also, I think, not quite correct to blame the development of American IPA solely on machismo. That's undeniably a big part of it nowadays, but, when the style developed, it was much more about adapting the basic idea of an English IPA to taste good using the grain and hops that were being grown in North America.
For a good (mostly British-focused) blog that covers some of this history in excruciating details, see Shut Up About Barclay Perkins.
This is a very loose implication that I won't bother addressing, nor your use of the word "solely".
Microbrewers don't actually think that.
The reason that a lot of them flood their beer with hops, is because:
1. It is extremely difficult to brew consistent batches of beer, week after week, month after month.
2. The extreme bitterness of hops masks the taste of pretty much everything... Including the inconsistencies.
So even if they aren't papering over actual errors in the brewing process, they are papering over inconsistencies.
Along those lines, I wish more microbreweries would put out sessionable beers that still taste good. Despite the variety of styles, it seems like most beers are in the 6%-7% at least, often more. As much as I love a good stout or IPA, sometimes I want something with lighter body in, say, the 4% ABV range. Guinness is my go-to for that reason even though I think it's just fine, not great. Deschutes Black Butte Porter is the best compromise I've found, but is rarely on tap where I live.
https://vinepair.com/booze-news/if-you-are-a-fan-of-ipa-scie...
You are not alone.
A microbrewer here in London said it really well: most small breweries go with IPA and in general overdo their hops because it allows to hide faults. Without the overpowering hoppiness their beers wouldn't taste good at all.
As a casual home brewer, I try to avoid hoppy concoctions. And at some point I will learn how to do proper German style weissbier...
For what it's worth, more hops absolutely masks errors in brewing. It's something that any homebrewer finds out very quickly.
IPA's/etc are very easy to get a drinkable beer out of no matter how many mistakes you make. (To be fair, it's not just IPA's that are forgiving. Weissbiers are actually quite easy to brew due to the yeast hiding off flavors nicely, and ambers can be easy due to lots of caramelized, unfermentable sugars hiding off flavors. You can overdo the sweetness in an amber or mess up the fermentation in a wheat more easily than you can make an undrinkable IPA, though.) That's not to say that really good IPAs are easy to brew, just that you'll get something drinkable no matter what.
Any commercial brewery _should_ be beyond basic mistakes, but scaling brewing is hard. What I'm saying really only applies to homebrewers, but I suspect it carries over to smaller breweries as well.
The hardest beers to brew well are actually Pilsners, Lagers, and American-style pilsners/mega-brews. Anything with very clean, crisp flavors. I hate to say it, but if you want to really test your skills, try brewing a miller lite clone... This is especially true in homebrewing, where proper lagering/aging and fermenting at low temps needed for lager yeasts used by pilsners/lagers/etc is difficult.
At any rate, my hat is off to Czech brewers. Trying to brew a really good pilsner or bohemian lager is damned hard to perfect, and it's an absolutely sublime style when done right. Sadly, it's somewhat rare to find a brewery in the US that can do it well.
In double-blinded taste tests conducted in my home, the adults concluded that Vienna lagers are the best, and IPAs are the worst.
So I would like to subscribe to your theory that brewers that are bad at brewing just throw more hops at the problem, so they can more easily sell their mistakes. Got some skunk's bathwater? Throw some hops in it!
The IPA was invented because beer shipped to India acquired off flavors due to the longer travel times. It is almost by definition bad beer.
More porter was shipped to India than pale ale. Would you consider porter by definition a bad beer?
Porter was already strongly hopped--a practice that overwhelms other flavors introduced in the brewing process, not just those that develop during transport. As a style of beer, yes, it is worse than more lightly hopped styles.
Or at least that's what the subjective testing in my household shows. De gustibus non est disputandum. Your own testing might rank porters differently, according to your own tastes. But if the test subject does not specifically enjoy the flavor imparted by hops, then all strongly-hopped beers will rank poorly. For someone that does really like hops, all the beers that are basically carbonated alcoholic hop juice will rank highly.
As for myself, I hate IPAs. In a double-blind test, I will always rank all the IPAs in the test set as dead last, with tasting notes such as "worst beer I have ever tasted" and "this beer causes suicidal ideation". It's still okay for other people to like them, I suppose, but I will never be able to understand those who do.
1st tier - California, Oregon, Washington - if its from a smallish brewery, it will be a good, hoppy IPA
2nd tier - Colorado / Idaho / Nevada / Montana - has some good IPAs, but could be hit or miss
3rd tier - Rest of USA - very hit or miss. At best it will be as good as a good west coast beer and at worst it will be strange and malty
4th tier - Australia / New Zeland - maybe best non USA IPAs ive ever had was from Pirate Brewing in Australia. This might be because of the high quality of new zeland hops.
5th tier Europe - Good luck! Had some pretty good IPAs in Ireland, and maybe some half decent ones from Britain, but overall the stuff they market as "IPA" tastes wrong, malty and flat.
6th tier Asia - Had a good ipa (on tap!) from Demo Pizza bar in Yangshuo China. Also some good ones in Hong Kong 7th tier: Africa - had one or two good IPAs in South Africa but for the most part its not really IPA
Overall, I think a good predictive equation for the quality of your IPA would be
quality = 1 / (distance_from_usa_west_coast * distance_from_a_city_with_brew_scene).
Ha! Because what you're expecting and looking for is an 'American IPA' (style not origin). The other half are English or Imperial (there is sometimes a technical and sometimes only marketing distinction to be made between the latter two) IPAs.
Personally, the stuff America 'markets as "IPA" tastes wrong" - citrusy and way over-carbonated!
It's unfortunate that they're made to sound so similar in my opinion, they're pretty different styles. Classic IPAs are much closer to other British bitters than they are to 'American IPA' (or to 'IPA' sold in America).
"Imperial" is a tough descriptor for a British style, at least in America, because here it's usually used to signify something akin to "double": more alcoholic, more hoppy, just generally "more."
'Imperial IPA' in Britain denotes a more traditional style - of course it's not regulated, but the one thing you can be certain of is that it won't be in the 'American IPA' style (you can get British made IPAs sold as 'American IPA', i.e. it is meant as a classifier of style, not orgin).
Traditional IPAs are low in carbonation even among British ales, highly hopped (boiled and dry), and 6-9%.
In short, the way you're saying it's used in America doesn't sound wrong to me!
(I believe dry hopping actually originated with the IPA, and its long voyage from London docks to India.)
You can't even trust bartenders to pour proper wells these days, charging $13 for an 8oz glass of Coca Cola and a drop of well brand just so you can see them reach for the bottle. The IPA fits in line with my boozehound on a budget lifestyle and always is the stated ABV.
The real story is that hoppy beer sells. That's the whole story; there's no other reason why they are so prevalent. The end.
To make these beers, here's what you have to deal with:
* The Hop market! Congratulations new brewery, you're either paying 2 or 3 times as much for popular hop varieties, or else you're going without and can suck on some Cascade. Good luck negotiating a reasonable contract for next year buying in pitiful amounts. You get to subject yourself and your razor-thin margins to the spot market.
* Hop quality. Hops age and oxidize fairly easily, and variability year to year is substantial. If you want any kind of quality and consistency, it's a big job to closely monitor your key ingredient.
* Hopping technique. Bittering, flavor, aroma, Whirlpool, hopstands, dry hopping, double-dry hopping, each pose unique challenges and opportunities, and brewers fuck it up all. the. time. Good hopping requires careful attention to process, and depends greatly on your highly variable ingredients. Get it wrong and some common flavor descriptors are: cat-piss, vegetal, astringent, etc. Truly, there is a whole cornucopia of shitty IPAs.
* DO - dissolved oxygen. Oxygen destroys hoppy beer very easily. Your process better be perfect, or else you better be pushing that shit out within a week or two. Distribution is a fool's errand unless you're a big fish.
* Hop bite. Basically this comes down to filtration, which smaller operations may not do. Fairly easy to avoid, but so very, very common.
FWIW, weissbier is a lot easier to brew. Find a maltster that works for you, test a couple different yeasts and fermentation profiles, and you're done. Maltsters are fucking legends that make a terrifically consistent product (not the bougie 'indie' guys, the real legends). And yeast suppliers aren't far off.
Now, the Germans will faff off about decoctions and hot-side oxygen and all that, and they do make good beer, but you can make really solid beer without even thinking of all that. I will drink a fresh weissbier every time over getting something imported from Germany to the US. Most of the time, I'll pick it over what you get in the German supermarkets.
It's a strange side effect of craft beer's "elevated" status. Multiple breweries in the same town need to differentiate themselves as if they are farms growing the same product acres apart. The more I think about the bizarre trends in the industry, the more I appreciate beer history.
This sort of ultra high IBU IPA remains really popular and all over the shelf when I go to Seattle or Portland.
This style of beer used to be popular in Vancouver, BC a few years ago too, but at this point the local craft brew scene has largely moved on from bitter west coast style hoppy IPAs, to the point now that when someone makes one its a bit of a novelty.
I personally love super-hoppy beers. In a weird way, it feels kind of similar to the way I love super-spicy food, or 90% dark chocolate, or black coffee. It's just a big "kick" that's fun in and of itself.
With all these things, the flavor balances are certainly important, but obviously an aspect of it is out of balance and that's the whole point, what I like about it.
So just, to each their own. I know plenty of people who despise hoppy beer. I'm just glad there's a proper full range of flavors at my local average supermarket. There wasn't before.
You are right about IPAs being easy to cover up poor brews. I brew, and people are really surprised when I tell them one of the hardest possible beers to brew would be a Budweiser clone, and one of the easiest is an IPA. Most IPA's have a very simple single malt and mash cycle, and it is essentially a hot tea made with hops. Then most of them are fermented. with some Safale high attenuation pretty bland US-05 yeast derivative. Any error or not even error with a pale lager like Budweiser would be exposed. It also takes a long time to make lagers due to the lagering progress and fermentation needing refrigeration.
The problem with people drinking these fresh dank double IPAs all the time is that every other style then seems bland as your taste buds are completely destroyed from drinking 100 IBU triple dry hopped beer. Then eventually you get sick of it, and every hazy juicy IPA starts becoming the same. There are way too many breweries now making generic silver cans filled with double IPA with some interesting art sticker. I'd short the craft beer industry if it were a stock.
I'm not really a beer person, but when I am its usually Coors Banquet or Pacifico, both of which I find tasty and refreshing (particularly on a hot day, with BBQ or Mexican). I also love Yuengling when I'm in the area for it, its the only beer I've gone out of my way to order.
I personally will drink an IPA from time to time, but will gladly drink any style really and particularly like stouts, German/Belgian beers. I also agree with the other child comment and will crack open a Budweiser gladly on a summer day on the beach. It is actually a very well executed beer, it is designed to be smooth and mild. I think the aversion to lagers is some amount of snobbery. I don't drink beers for image so don't care!
After drinking hoppy beers for a while, your brain associates the pleasure from the sugar and alcohol with the taste of the hops. You think you like the hops, but you really just like the sugar and alcohol. Without the hops though, the beer would be unpalatable.
It's a lot easier to add lots of hops.
I personally love stouts and porters - yet there is a severe shortage of them. There was a 'whiskey/bourbon barrel aged RIS" craze short while ago, but it was all the same.. and they were available only in brewery pubs.
When i go to store the beer wall is full of IPAs, another one is full of lagers(I'll pass on them).. and maybe 2-3 types of stouts/sours/porters are mixed with IPAs.
There are a few pilsner/lager breweries but they have to be so much better at their styles and are still missing out on a large portion of the market.
Specialized sour breweries exist and do somewhat well, but the market is limited and the product takes years to age.
> Being intimately aware of the financial health of your company might not be glamorous, but it is as important as monitoring your fermentations or selecting hops.
At the advice of a therapist, a friend of mine started looking for things which bring him joy, with the phrasing, "I love $X. It brings me joy." We started doing it together, and I've also started doing it on my own. I realized that one of the things that brings me the most joy is a clean house; but I hated to clean. Somehow, verbalizing that a clean house brings me joy has made the process of cleaning... enjoyable. Cleaning went from something I 'had to' do for abstract (guilt from upbringing) or external reasons (friends and clients coming to the house), to something I do, just for me. And again, somehow, it has also made a clean house more enjoyable to me.
There will always be the parts you love and the parts you don't want to have to do. Selecting hops, especially for something that many people will potentially enjoy, is super fun (in my imagination anyway). But it is only by "being intimately aware of the financial health of your company" that you are even in a position to do such a thing. Based on my experience, connecting these two things in your psyche is the key to at least easing the burden, if not making the entire process enjoyable.
On the flip side, obviously only if it's something you can manage to do, this is also a good litmus test for whether you should just hire someone to help you out.
* If you don't care about having a clean house and don't enjoy cleaning: Don't worry about it.
* If you do care about having a clean house and don't enjoy cleaning: Learn to enjoy cleaning (as you have), or hire someone to help clean.
* If you do care about having a clean house and don't mind cleaning: Clean it yourself.
To bring it back to the topic at hand, I'm quite surprised to see the article dismiss the idea of hiring an accountant to manage your books and give you a general sense of your financial health/etc. I think it could be well worth the money, especially if the most likely alternative is (as it is for most people I would imagine) to just ignore it.
That doesn't mean you have to be ignorant of the financial health of your company, in fact just the opposite: A good accountant will let you know about problems you would've been ignorant of before they even arise.
It's ironic as well, because the types of jobs he is running away from (spreadsheets, sales, boredom) are even more pronounced in this industry.
I appreciate having a job completely removed from my interests in life. And I've found the inverse of the above axiom to be true: jobs that seem super unappealing from the outside are often the most rewarding. Either the people who do it really enjoy it, or get treated well to stay in their position.
For most of our history, humans have not had many if any choices about the type of lives they live or the work they do. It would make sense that we are ill equipped to handle making good choices.
I realised, "This is not a job I want" and gave it up. All of the successful brewers I know (and I'm lucky enough to know quite a few) really enjoy building a business. Brewing is what they do because brewing is cool to them, but their real passion is building the business. I had a lucky escape, because that's just not my thing.
Every corp ends up being much more intensive in the administrative side once the process or product has been standardized or reached a stable version. Isn't this the case for most businesses, including tech?
A lot of startup founders, including myself, fall in love with the idea of building technology -- but quickly learn founders are usually required to be great salespeople more than great technologists.
I figured that out from doing photography. People are like "wow you take good pictures you should be a photographer." They never go "wow you love working long hours and doing paperwork, you should start a business!"
Yes. If it's a business (as opposed to, say, a hobby), success lies in being good at the administrative side. Even something that's kinda both like Linux: every interview I've read with Linus T in the last decade or two he makes it very clear he spends virtually all of his time managing administrative tasks.
[Source] https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/...
The rise of "ghost kitchens" tries to solve this in some way but I think there's opportunity to go further.
2. For restaurants, it's either "ghost/cloud kitchens" or franchises. If you go outside those, it's possible that restaurants require too much uniqueness and too much risk to fit a standardized model.
http://www.sleepinggiantbrewing.com/ is an example of one such contract only business.
And is that something that can, with the right investment be scaled, and offered affordably ?
Or is it inherently expensive ?
As for incorporation, tax filing, payroll and everything else a business needs, there are already companies providing those services to the food industry. Maybe they're ripe for disruption by a superior experience though?
Brewing (alongside baking) is one of a few jobs to actually resurrect itself as a luxury good where it is lucrative to stay small.
Running a brewery is generally far easier than running any other kind of alcoholic establishment. The permits are often easier and the hours are limited. One successful approach I've seen is to locate cheap light industrial space around well paying businesses in areas with horrible traffic. You'll capture a well behaved, affluent clientele and only need to open from 4-9pm. Even in towns with a saturated brewery market (San Diego...), there are areas which still need breweries because of the effects of traffic. Many folks would much rather wait for traffic to die down with a beer in their hands, and maybe grab a quick food truck dinner.
it seems like there hasn't been any real technological progress in craft brewing since the 90's. in the 90's, there were unix based control systems, with X11 interfaces, for larger craft breweries, while smaller breweries were using notebooks and pens.
now, there are spreadsheets.
it seems like there's a lot of room for the booming craft beer industry to have a shake up in software.
there are, actually. if you're near Portland I'd discuss over a pint.
beersmith targets homebrewers, fermentable replaces some of the note taking and materials ordering, and ekos seems to focus on consulting (no prices available, and "we'll build it!").
none of this replaces the automated brewing systems, even in small production lines or automated data collection, leaving notebooks on pretty much every fermentor.
if you want a good look at a large number of craft breweries, and get a good insight to exactly how their processes work, what's missing, and what commonality there is, I'd highly recommend https://oregoncraftbeer.org/zwickelmania/ - almost every brewery in Oregon ends up open, touring, and explaining their process in depth.
I found out about https://www.craftautomation.com/ recently from /r/thebrewery, which looks interesting.
I'm just a home brewer, but I also enjoy some of the control system aspects. I created a little flow controller display a year or so ago, to measure water from the HLT->mash tun.
I think OP is right, brewing remains pretty low tech. The process is ultimately not that complicated, as befits an 8000-year old craft! The step that is most difficult/error-prone, malting, has been outsourced to a few large industrial producers. The rest is essentially just making tea and letting it sit around.
Then again, so is most line-of-business software. ;)
https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Start-Brewery-Lagunitas/dp/1...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v_dJC0AKD8&list=PLjZRIC6PME...
Names of previous concoctions:
* War Priest
* Long Rest
* Bardic Inspiration
* Little Dagger
They go into detail about what each ingredient will/should add to the final taste.
My uncharitable pet theory is this: A certain class of men (sometimes women, but it's almost always men) get interested in something and then desire to make it part of their identity. That in turn means they want to convey that they are more into it than other people. Their passion expresses itself as competition.
Most people that aren't really into beer don't like hops and bitterness. It is very much an acquired taste. So liking hoppy beers is a good signal that "look how much more into beer I am than you!" Even better — and this is always a good signal that bros have shown up to suck the fun out of your hobby — there is a number you can use to measure it. Menus show IBUs so a table full of dudes can pick their poison and show how hardcore they are.
I like some amount of hops, but I've had beers that literally just taste like hop tea. The flavor just dominates everything else and leaves little room to enjoy all of the fun nuances you can get from the actual brew.
Before IPAs it was porters with the darker the better. Or Belgian beers with competitions to see who can handle the highest ABV. It's always about getting the best score and not just, you know, enjoying some beer.
My favorite Tweet ever was someone who described this process that dudes do where they show up, take over a hobby, and drive all the fun out (and thus women) as "MENTRIFICATION". It is my new favorite word.
See also: Riding bicycles, listening to music (ugh audiophiles), metal guitarists playing 64th note scales, etc. I can't wait for the day that bros discover knitting and it becomes nothing but a race to see who can make the longest scarves.
It is kind of unfortunate because there should really be nothing gender specific about cycling.
That said, I see it happening there too. Once bike prices started skyrocketing and it became quite a bit more popular, you can occasionally come across a bad personality on the trails. Still fairly rare though.
Plenty of women around here bike commute, mtb, etc. Women are very vocal in these part on cycling rights and livable cities in general.
There's a women-owned bike shop that caters specifically to people who want to find car replacements in their lives. I'm very proud of them, so I have to share:
It seems like this happens, sometimes in the US... for years beer in the US wasn't that great, and then there was this craft beer explosion, whereas in, say, Austria where I lived for a while, they are still drinking their local beers which are pretty good but don't have so much variety and experimentation.
But no matter how good a saddle is, for a person just starting with a "real" road bike, who has not been on a bike for many months or years, there's going to be a couple of weeks of discomfort before your posterior anatomy toughens up and you stop feeling some discomfort.
A couple of weeks of riding 20km a day at a very leisurely pace should do it. Once you get past that wall, a properly fit saddle should cause no discomfort at all.
There are lot of variance between different IPAs and Pale Ales, I prefer more citrus and mosaic ones. My favorite is Sculpin IPA and Wolfback Ridge IPA and my least favorite is probably Racer 5 even thought its generally highly rated.
I also sometimes feel disdain and judgment towards other peoples' interests, (pop music, for example) but I feel more and more as I get older that that those feelings do not serve me (or anyone else) in any positive way.
I mean, I like coffee too and picked up that habit right quick in high school. I didn't do it because I was trying to be "manly", I did it because it was the only way I could pay attention to classes, and I rapidly came to like it. Coffee is bitter. So are grapefruits, and brussel sprouts and a lot of things that some people just enjoy.
Not everyone has to agree, and it doesn't need to get labeled as some kind of weird virtue signaling.
I do like the "mentrification" word though! Although it sounds like we differ in what I consider the "fun" in a hobby.
I think they're just trying to convey that there is a decent sized subset of beer drinkers who seem to drink IPA's for a reason much different from yours.
That said, I can’t eat a straight grapefruit, even covered in sugar. Love a grapefruit soda though.
My experience with west coast beers convinced me that hops were awful and that my ideal bear would have _just_ enough hops to prevent spoilage and that's it. Which is why I drank nothing but Scotch ales, Belgian beers, and milk stouts for a long time. Eventually, I even started moving away from beer as I finally decided to give wine a chance.
And then I tried a New England-style hazy IPA, and I fell in love. It's hoppy, but it's not bitter. Most have 40 IBUs at the absolute most, and 30 is pretty common (and when it's 40, it's balanced out by enough malt that the bitterness isn't detectable). They taste like alcoholic orange juice (less harsh than a screwdriver, though). So nowadays I will drink every hazy, juicy, and milkshake IPA I can get my hands on. (Edit:) So it turns out I actually do like hops after all; I just hated what west coast beers did with them.
And milkshake IPAs really make a mockery of the original concept of an IPA: not only are they not bitter, but they're actively sweet because they have added lactose (which is an unfermentable sugar and thus directly contributes to sweetness). They're great if you really want an IPA for people who hate IPAs.
By and large the best places to get a good dipa is at the brewery. Most of favorites see very limited distribution and very small runs. Finding a triple ipa is a task on its own. Quality, and consistency is all over the place between breweries and batches. I've bought cans that've spoiled on the shelf. Some breweries have purchase limits because enterprising folk have filled vans with cases of beer to resell in other states.
Sours, like hill farmsteads ales, but more tart, have seen a resurgence. Stouts are still waning in popularity. Pilsners have a place in most long running breweries list as a fallback for those with less experienced or more traditional palates.
I've grown fond of strong kombuchas >3% abv, goses, dry ciders, and randalled brews that have been cropping up lately. I've also had quite a few beers made with teas that have been great. Don't write off meads or gruits either.
I'm not sure about that. The "New England IPA" style comes from well, Vermont. And when done well is is a smooth, creamy intense hop milkshake.
If that’s their way of enjoying things, then what’s so bad about it? They presumably dislike a lot of the hobbies you enjoy, they’re not out there to ‘mentrify’ them. (Why this gendered insulting is okay when it’s aimed against men, I don’t know.)
Yet you can say the exact same thing about cooperation. I would argue that cooperation is atleast as critical an ingredient here as competition. Indeed, the infrastructure that allows me to view the comment you posted depends on open standards, open source software and generally could not have existed without groups of people working together to accomplish goals.
I would personally say that cooperation, freedom and passion are more important than competition, greed and ego in terms of enabling the accomplishments of our society.
That is not to say that competition has no role to play, but it is part of a melange of human dynamics that are necessary. Specifically, competition works best between between groups of freely cooperating individuals, especially when those groups can periodically set aside that competition to cooperatively further the goals of their mutual passions and dreams.
These things aren't mutually exclusive. You can compete as a team and with the help of friends.
Nothing rong, per se, but there are limits to what individuals can do on their own. When you eliminate groups of cooperating individuals, there are much lower limits to what can be accomplished. Specifically when taking about the achievements of society, most enterprises require the efforts of cooperating groups. I feel like this is blatantly evident and doesn't require explanation.
> It's still coeperation on a societal scale, e.g competing as an individual in a competition is still co-operating with the competition itself.
I think you are mangling the definition of 'cooperation" here. It certainly is possible to compete and cooperate simultaneously (often by strictly limiting the scope of the competition and by sharing knowledge), but that doesn't mean that competing is cooperation. Even so, within that "societal scale" competition, the best results are achieved by groups that operate with either no or greatly limited internal competition.
If you take part in a competition, you are cooperating with its organisers in making the event happen.
> there are much lower limits to what can be accomplished
We are talking about small achievments though, e.g opening a brewery.
If I read a book about that, am I cooperating with its author? If not, plenty is possible without cooperation; If so, lots can be achieved via indirect cooperation.
Ego isn't going away any time soon, and you will never know anyone who has renounced their ego, because only ego wants you to share that.
Competition can be a lot of fun, so that's ok. As long as it's not driven by jealousy or envy.
Greed - we all have psychological impulses that make us think that one thing is not enough and we need more of it. Most of us do that now through our careers. Including me, I'm still pushing for the bigger paycheck.
Greed and ego can easily be symptomatic of unstoppable freedom and passion. We sometimes call that perfectionism and it's a curse.
All in all, it's not as simple as it looks unless your ego tells you that it's actually that simple for you. In which case...
Sure, and most do, across genders.
> If that’s their way of enjoying things, then what’s so bad about it?
Every act tends to have social/economic implications that affect how others participate, even if unintentional. Walk into a bar now, and often eight out of the ten taps are high IBU IPAs. Fewer choices for people that aren't into the hops competition.
Some people will be rude to others who don't want to play the competitive game.
> (Why this gendered insulting is okay when it’s aimed against men, I don’t know.)
Men collectively have enough power to handle a funny critical term without risk of being marginalized.
> Men collectively have enough power to handle a funny critical term without risk of being marginalized.
What does men collectively have enough power even mean? It's not like all the men in the world work together to decide the fate of all the poor, powerless women. Where is black men's power? Where is the homeless white men's power? And why should risk of being marginalized factor into it? Insulting a very large fraction of humanity for the actions of a small subset shouldn't be OK no matter who it is. Would insulting all Muslims for the actions of a few fringe sects be OK? I mean, they should collectively have enough power to handle it, they even run whole countries!
Decry the actions of bros all you want, but why expand that to saying all men do this as "mentrification" implies? Doing so is both inaccurate and hurtful to many people for no reason other than feeling smug that some man (who most likely isn't very privileged) finally got their comeuppance.
And not only is this unfair, it’s silly. Brewing has always been an almost exclusively male hobby, the rise of the hop nerd is nothing to do with sex at all, contrary to what the word might imply.
Evidences:
At quilting shows, numeric boasting is also common - number of hours, number of pieces, number of spools of thread, I've even seen a count of the number of broken quilting needles.
Carbon fiber knitting needles are a thing. I own some. The packaging talks about how carbon fiber is also used in aerospace. (In case, I dunno, you need to get those puppies moving through the air really fast, maybe?)
My grandmother's approach to baking Christmas cookies.
(That said, MENTRIFICATION is a hilarious term, I chuckled out loud, and I will be using it in the future, with only moderate fear that doing so will emasculate me or invert the patriarchy, and minor hope that people who like to complain about political correctness will be offended on political grounds.)
Mentrification is just a clever play on words.
The actual observation definitely rings true for me. I remember as a middle schooler not wanting to admit i was learning guitar until i was ’good enough’.
I think this is definitely tied to identity. Something that you can work at and see demonstrable progress is comforting in a way, but i can see how it easily leads to passion as competition.
But mostly it’s a pun.
Even to the extent this is true, it’s a poisonous attitude, responsible for a lot of acrimony in society today, and I urge you to reconsider it.
The attitude of “you can punch up but not down” leads to a lot more punching, especially when members of the group you’ve declared as “up” start getting sick of being punched and decide to punch back.
You can't 'hate on hate' without becoming the hater you hated.
> My favorite Tweet ever was someone who described this process that dudes do where they show up, take over a hobby, and drive all the fun out (and thus women) as "MENTRIFICATION". It is my new favorite word.
I believe that this is a loaded word that does nothing but churn the online gender conflict machine propagated by places like (surprise) Twitter. It doesn't highlight a type of person as the cause, it highlights a gender. The Meaningness article concerning "mops", the "mop invasion", and the "sociopaths" that follow[0] is overall a more accurate representation of what happens when a hobby, craft, or culture is co-opted like this.
So you think that less women ride bicycles and drink beer than 20 years ago?
Just as OP complains about bros getting to into things like beer as their identity, maybe the fail to realize that other people make their identities about real or perceived social injustices and how awesome they are to bring them up a every chance maybe not realizing that's more annoying.
I definitely see a certain culture of men that glom onto things like beer or bicycles or coding and making that their identity. It is because of this that they are seen as "Mentrifying" those hobbies. I do think that there is some risk in those groups alienating those without the same passion from becoming involved in those hobbies. In fact one of the reasons I don't golf anymore is exactly this. Golf culture is intensly insular and full of arrogant people (not to say that all are this way or maybe it has changed since I last golfed).
I agree "golf people" are insufferable that's why I avoid them as much as possible.
At my last job the competition for a few months was who had the largest vimfile. And if you used other editor you weren't manly enough, of course.
People will complain, but dudebros are able to suck the fun out of anything. And the professionalism.
Absolutely! I'm seeing the same thing in chocolate, where people chase cocoa %ages, and spicy food, where people brag about how many Scoville Units they can handle.
Someone upthread mentioned stinky cheese, dry wine, and peaty Islay Scotch. Those things don't yet have absolute metrics - it'd be amusing to see what happens if they ever do.
https://www.decanter.com/learn/advice/tannin-scale-ask-decan...
For peat in Scotch, the "phenol parts per million":
https://www.theyorkshiregent.com/whisky/the-scotch-whisky-pe...
Not sure if someone's found a way to game cheese yet.
Wikipedia sorely needs a page listing quantitative metrics of comestible qualia.
Inspired by those two, I went on a hunt for a cheese metric but the search results got rapidly unpleasant ("Why does it smell like Swiss cheese behind my ears?" was what made me finally close the tab.)
Occasionally, I'm rather fond of Vacherin Mont d'Or, which in its original, raw milk based, recipe, is kind of the equivalent of Fugu for the landlocked.
I've never tried your Swiss gloop but I am intrigued. One online seller claims that, "with one taste, [it] commands spontaneous exuberance." I wonder what form the exuberance takes? I will look out for it.
So while there is of course a rough correlation with ppm to final "peatiness", some scotches with slightly higher initial ppm may not end up tasting quite as "peaty" as some with slightly lower initial ppm may.
It does seem like PPM is being used "as marketing" in a few places these days though, which is probably to your point, and possibly a sign of things to come. :/
----
A more common thing I see/hear is people bragging about scotch age and price. Older is not always better! Too old, and you can certainly lose some delightful peat characteristics present in younger ages, or get too much cask influence.
Taste is a weird thing. People hate bitter coffee, but seem to worship bitter beers.
It sounds like your description would firmly fit the second group. (It doesn't need to be gendered, although it does usually seem to be men who act this way.)
Yes, definitely.
There are some who feel that their membership in the group is all they have and thus the more people in the group, the relatively less they are. Insecurity is the root of gatekeeping.
So hacker news and technophiles? Good grief you sound worse than the people you are criticizing. Heaven forbid people like something.
ABV = Alcohol by Volume
IBU = International Bitterness UnitsIt's gross.
Also I hate IPAs.
Programming for instance "I worked on a 1M LoC system" "Mine was 10M LoC", or "I worked on a 1000 requests per second" "Aah that's nothing, we got 1M requests per second" etc.
Fitness is an obvious one. Especially now your can track your average minutes per mile and all that shit on your phone. It is much more enjoyable just going out for a jog and fuck the metrics.
But the reason that's even an issue in the first-place is because of grandstanding hop-heads pushing the upper limit so high that a casual drinker selecting a brew at random has an increased chance of getting something they'd find completely unpalatable.
It's like hot sauce. You didn't need to put the Scoville units on the menu until people started making hot sauces that would peel the lining off your digestive tract. But they didn't start making those hot sauces until people started measuring and talking about Scoville units as the only metric worth caring about.
Men used to primarily compete at killing one another and general conquest -- these all seem like fairly harmless alternatives comparatively.
1) Admit that you're taking it farther than necessary because you get joy/fulfillment from the competition.
2) Appreciate and welcome the non-competitive hobbyists.
You see the same with coffee. "I love coffee!" "Well I love it MORE so I don't put sugar in it." "Well I love it EVEN MORE so I drink it black." "Well I love it EVEN MORE THAN YOU so I only drink black espresso with six shots a cup!"
Maybe this thing you complain about isn't something that people do, not just (American)(young)(white)(rich) males.
I don't judge since taste is subjective, but I made the decision to cut back on chilies a few years ago when I realised it was getting in the way of enjoying the food. Up until then it was almost a personal challenge just to see where I could push it, for no real reason.
I also think it's not very nice to accuse people of not actually enjoying their hobbies.