this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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The problem with IPA's is not that people enjoy them or that brewers brew them and pubs stock them. The problem is that there's so many of them, all purporting to be slightly different, that it's pushing out other kinds of beer. The amount of times I have walked into a pub and there's somewhere between three and seven IPA's and I ask if they've got any stouts and the answer is, "We've got Guinness."
Part of that is seasonal. You're not going to get a stout in the summer, just like you're not going to get an Oktoberfest in the spring or a Shandy in the winter. Like you said about IPAs, there are so many variations, they've become a year round beer. Other year round beers are things like lagers and ales. Comparing a seasonal style to a year round beer isn't a fair comparison
If you can't find a stout on tap in the winter, you're going to the wrong breweries
I live in the UK. My experience has been that the selection of beers isn't that seasonal. Sure there will be guest beers in some pubs/chains but for example I can go to a Sam Smith's pub and they have four stouts year round plus a pretty good porter. Just a lot of people don't like to go to Sam Smith's pubs because the owner has... feelings about one thing and another.
So if I'm meeting friends usually there's something nearby that we're planning to do and in a great number of pubs the choice is Guinness or nothing.
Stouts are expensive to brew and take a long time, which is why you don't see breweries make more of them. Also, they tend to brew what sells.
Right but the higher concentration of complex sugars means you need longer to get to the desired attenuation, making longer secondary fermentation almost part of the style. Beyond that, most stout gets bottle or keg conditioned for several more weeks, as this really aids in development of the desired complexity. I used to work at a brewery and did BJCP training and "young" stouts tend to have a very obvious flavor profile most people don't like. With other ales, we would turn around a batch from grain to cans to sales in about three weeks, but the stouts were more like a 2 month process at minimum. Our best selling gingerbread stout basically took all year to brew. Most breweries treat stouts like the special occasion they are because doing so produces something incredible, and rushing it produces something mediocre.
Complex sugars are simply not going to be metabolized by yeast, which is why many dark beers are cloying? Not all dark beers (IE schwartzbier) are sweet because of better conversion in malting and mashing (and water chemistry)?
IPAs can have very quick turn around though. A local place only uses kveik…