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@DEERBLOOD they became trendy and soaked up the expendable income of people who got into them. If you want to start a brewery you are losing market share by not making at least one IPA. People who only drink ipas encourage breweries to brew more ipas at the expense of other, perfectly ok varieties. Ipas are the beer of chronic weedoids who are never going to drink anything else and create a local maximum that no force has yet dislodged craft breweries from.
This is rambly but there's a lot of reasons but the tldr is that they are popular with people with expendable income and that keeps craft brewers distracted from doing other things.
@HonkHonkBoom @DEERBLOOD The only reason the IPA exists is because it was the only way for British brewers could make a beer that wouldn't spoil by the time the ship made it to the troops fighting in India. It was never meant as a taste additive at those levels. It was meant as a preservative. The troops hated the taste but preferred it to drinking the local dysentery water. Even back then India was a shit hole where clean water was an impossibility. Hipsters are retarded.
@HonkHonkBoom @DEERBLOOD The other business aspect of the popularity of the IPA is that it is a much easier beer to brew with consistent flavor outcomes and lower the content of the most expensive ingredient of beer, the grains. It's easy to hide defects in a bitter product. It's difficult to hide defects in sweet beer with a higher, more expensive malt content. Win, win for the brewers. (Just like it is easier to hide BBQ sauce stains on a dark shirt than it is a white shirt.) It always makes me laugh when I see a premium price for a "double IPA". Marketing is much smarter than the average hipster.
@DEERBLOOD @pwm whole west coast is shitty with IPAs

to be fair nowhere in the US compares to Belgium or Czechia/Bavaria

it's a little funny to me to see all the US-style ale micros popping up in Europe though. I'll take "perfected over a couple centuries and we took our time brewing it" over "i thought this might be neat to try and got it out as cheaply as possible"