Badace52 said:
Quote:
IPA only exists because due to the antibacterial properties of hops, beer on ships setting sail for India from Europe was over-hopped to prevent spoiling. The beer tasted bad, but it was drinkable for much longer. It's a bad beer and there is no reason for it to exist today. I am of the firm belief that the only people that actually like it either have taste buds insensitive to thiourea family bitter taste (approximately 1/3 of people do not have these receptors) or have convinced themselves it is not horribly bitter.
This is a common myth. The origin of IPAs is a lot more varied and nuanced than that. A big part of it has to do with water chemistry and the way that certain minerals affect your perception of hop bitterness. The water found a Burton on Trent (where the Bass brewery is located) has incredibly high calcium and sulfate content, but with an alkalinity level that's balanced by high hardness. The mineral content of that water leads to a really clean hop bitterness that a lot of people seem to like. It was never this unpopular beer that soldiers acquired a taste for over time due to lack of alternatives. It was popular in England when and where it was first brewed.
Also, high hop content doesn't even do a very good job of preserving finished beer. Alcohol content does a much better job of preserving beer that has finished fermentation. Where the antimicrobial properties of alpha acids from hops come into play is at the beginning of fermentation, when various microbes are competing for a spot at the table. Alpha acids inhibit bacterial growth, but don't really affect yeast, which is great when you have fresh wort and you want the yeast to take a foothold. Once beer gets above 4% or so ABV during fermentation, there are very few bacterial microbes that are capable of infecting a beer at standard storage or fermentation temperature.
EDIT: Doing a little more reading on this, there are conflicting arguments out there about the alcohol levels needed to inhibit bacterial growth. The amount of alcohol in a normal beer certainly will not completely eliminate bacteria (or we'd never have tasty lambics) but it does still inhibit them. One article I found suggested that the dryness of early IPAs (relative to porters) was key to their ability to survive the journey to India moreso than anything else (i.e. no residual sugar means less for bad bacteria to munch on.)
It is definitely true that 1800s era British IPAs weren't nearly as hoppy or bitter as some of the modern American west coast IPAs, but that's a development that's only really happened in the past 20 years or so. I compare it to the hot chilli cookoffs where guys get into pissing contests over how spicy they can make their chilli.
At the end of the day, the recent American IPA craze has nothing to do with beer preservation, and a lot to do with how it tastes to the people who like it. Maybe that's because some people genuinely like it, and maybe it's because some guys like to show off how "manly" or whatever they are by drinking their hop-sanity quintuple IPA. I say to each his own, and cheers.