Even still, they are made in abundance.
IPAs are being made in abundance because that's what people are buying. if tastes shifted tomorrow towards another style, brewers would be making those instead.
people get into craft beer because they want flavor and one of the strongest tasting beers you can get is a hoppy IPA. hence their popularity, IMO.
I think if I buy beer for home consumption it will be German Beers. I appreciate the purity laws and I have no idea what other people are putting in their beers.
that's a false fear, IMO. the big megabrewers are the only ones you need to worry about what goes in their products. you know that blue moon that you like? it wouldn't pass the Reinheitsgebot (german purity law) because they add orange peel and coriander. hell, even wheat isn't allowed so hefeweizens aren't compliant. shows how stupid and anachronistic that "law" is. it made sense back in the 1500's because people were putting sh*t in beer that was unhealthy or deadly. today's it strikes me as something that people get all unnecessarily amped up about. "look at me, i comply with the purity law!!!!". who cares. anyone who refuses to brew with ingredients like oatmeal, rye or honey just because of some german's lack of science 600 years ago is an idiot.
As for IPA's it will never be a favorite of mine. I don't like that much Hops.
james ford did unto me as i am about to do unto you, so remember this: you will eat these words in a year or two. your tolerance and craving for hops will happen. it's inevitable. vinnie chilurzo, from russian river, coined the term "lupulin threshold shift" (see
page 4 of this PDF).
And it is cheaper for small breweries to make IPA's than Lagers. It might take more hops but the set-up costs to make lagers is very high. American Mass-produced Lagers are cheaper mostly because they use cheap ingredients including corn and rice fillers.
The costs aren't even close for a small brewery:
"For a craft brewery to produce 10,000 barrels of beer, it would cost £150,000. Ten thousand barrels of lager would cost £1million,? he says, as he leads me around Meantime?s brewery on a south London industrial estate. The brewery is currently being expanded to meet demand."
the problem with that last quote is that he's mixing fixed and variable costs. that brewery is already set up for ales, so making an IPA only involves cost of ingredients (which are higher than lagers' ingredients). it would cost him a million to make the same amount of lager, because he needs to spend 900,000 on new equipment. that quote, out of context, could lead someone to believe that it costs almost 7 times more to brew a lager. that simply isn't true, if only because he hasn't included his fixed costs to make ale.
it all depends what you invest in - $600k up-front to make more expensive per-barrel ales, or $900k to make cheaper per-barrel lagers. and when you're talking fixed vs. variable, you need to take into consideration what time period are you looking at. (numbers made up for illustrative purposes, and some gross generalizations were made... you can make a cheap cream ale and a very expensive dopplebock lager)
