Too many people cargo-cult drinking and put up a bunch of snobbery. The worst are beer folks who always seem to gravitate towards the most intense IPAs while ignoring the wonderful range of Pilsners and Lagers that are out there.
I'm a snobby scotch drinker and agree with a little water.
I was actually taught to add a little water to scotch in multiple pretty knowledgeable Scottish whisky shops and distilleries. The snobbish behavior around neat drinking is just that. Especially cask strength bottlings which really need something to open it. Just a tiny dribble of water, but it helps.
Icing anything though tends to dull rather than enhance flavor, so that's not for me, but couldn't care less how you drink it.
That said, if you friends are just drinking expensive, but mediocre and dull highlands type whisky, the water won't add much. If you're drinking something like an Islay with a lot more depth to the flavor it helps more.
People have been drinking beer for thousands of years. There’s a lot of value in high-quality, classic styles.
[Cries in Czech]
I jest of course :) The ležák beers that are most popular in Czech Republic (Pilsner Urquell in Bohemia; Radegast in Moravia/Silesia) are veeery nice, but they're probably not a huge departure from any good German beers, though there's some really fun smaller breweries doing cool stuff you may not see internationally. Great excuse to visit though :D
Apologies if it sounded like I was scolding, I didn't mean it that way at all :)
[0] - this is actually a fairly divisive issue to this day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czec...
From my limited experience making beer at home, it's much harder to make a mediocre simple brown ale than a mediocre simple IPA. Grain and mashing is harder to iterate on than hops. Apparently the experts make a yeast bread with their desired grain bill as a prototyping shortcut (compared to spending days or weeks brewing and fermenting a batch of ale), but I never got that far before I was diagnosed with celiac and had to give up the homebrewing dream.
I'll grant that there was a time when a lot of places were IPA heavy but they basically always had a few other styles.
Now every brewery around me is really varied. They might have a couple types of IPAs but all have another 6 or 10 + styles. A sour or two, such as a Belgian or American type. Often a berlinerweisse. Some brown/stout/porter types. Not just oatmeal stout. And even different lager types besides "lager". I see Helles and bock, Vienna, pilsner, everywhere. A rauchbier at one place.
I've never really had to look at the IPAs in years.
I'm sorry you had bad luck finding the local craft breweries specializing in things other than IPAs, but they certainly exist in the US. I know that I appreciate how much Belgian influence happened in my city's craft brewing scene at a critical juncture. There are breweries here specializing in sours from years before it was a more national fad. Their only mistake not having a big enough distribution to get the most profit advantage from more recent trends or be that well known outside of the city.
Did it ever occur to you and those who think like you that people drink IPAs (and double, Imperial, triple, etc...) because they like them? Not because of lack of experience (I'm old, I've been into beer from all over the world of all types in my travels) but simple preference?