I happened to stumble across one of the dumbest things I think that I’ve ever seen in defining beers styles in 40+ years of thinking about this stuff. Dumb it certainly is, BUT it also explains a lot about how marketing sits totally detached from reality.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that we can sit here for another 40+ years and argue about individual beers and how style guidelines can be massaged one way or another, but apparently the beer industry is making the following distinction.
Not all Hazy IPAs are New England (style) IPAs.
Doug Velky walks us through this distinction in this video, which he prefaces by saying, “The classic Hazy IPA would Sierra Nevada’s Hazy Little Thing, which you’d never call New England-style.”
“NEVER”? Almost everyone in the real world is doing EXACTLY that!
Please know that I fully understand the subtle differences that Doug is referring to in his video, but this is madness. This is a technicality that is ALL about marketing and absolutely NOTHING to do with beer, and I am confused by Doug’s statement that we’d never call SN Hazy Little Thing beer an NEIPA. 99% of the beer drinkers of the world are doing EXACTLY that! Those people are also still able to understand that Hazy Little Thing is a different beer to, say Tree House Julius, but that doesn’t create the need for this kind of parsing of styles. This analysis is strictly for people that work on Madison Avenue, and not for people that drink in the bars of the USA. Those two groups aren’t speaking the same language here, and anyway palates, not words, will ultimately allow people distinguish between the two NEIPAs that are Hazy Little Thing, and (for example) Julius.
I’m not naive and I’m not stupid. I know the relevance of marketing in beer, but the statement that, you’d never call Hazy Little Thing an NEIPA has me asking, who is “you”?
