Jim Koch of Boston Beer Company, sounding a bit like someone most famous for brewing a mediocre lager, and never making a good IPA. (and sounding like atomicfront)
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/blogs/99bottles/2013/04/mystic_brewing_finds_a_niche_j.htmlThey were also forthcoming. Koch in particular has a problem with hob-bombs, the big, boozy, 100-plus IBU beers that have been en vogue in recent years. I asked Koch what he thought of the Alchemist's Heady Topper and other massive IPAs. In a part of the interview that didn't make the paper, Koch said, "They're big IPAs. There's 100 of them. Are they new or interesting? Not really. I mean they're good, but there's nothing I'm going to learn from tasting that. There's not a huge set of skills to make an 80-IBU beer."
"There's probably 100 really good 80-IBU IPAs, and there's probably 500 or 1,000 that are out there. It's not that they're bad. It's like drinking Bud or Miller or Coors. You know what you're going to get, you're not going to be surprised. If you're surprised it's generally a bad surprise."
Koch expanded on what he meant.
"I think you go through stages as a beer drinker. And there is an early stage where you want the hoppiest stage that you can get. And then you go past it. It's like scotch drinkers, there's a stage where you want the peatiest, smokiest scotch and think that's quality. But you get through that stage, and then you're looking at the real fundamentals of quality, which to me is not just a lot of flavor but is balance, and complexity and harmony. That's kind of where I am. Let me see what flavors they put in there and how they came together. Because that I'll learn from. There's a real purpose of the brewer's art, which is not to make strange, exotic, extreme. At the end of the day the purpose of the brewer's art is to make beers that give people pleasure."
