Bitter By You, Bitter Than Me: Decibel 75, January 2011

The makers of Keystone Light (which would be, in fact, Coors) definitely did not have craft beer drinkers in mind when they trotted out their ridiculous “bitter beer face” commercials back in the ’90s (Youtube that shit, you won’t be sorry). The basic idea was that people don’t want bitter beer. And therein lies the ridiculousness, because without the bitter bite of hops, beer would just be, well, sweet and malty. And maybe there’s a market for that in Germany, where hops use is generally pretty restrained in the heavier beers, but any well-balanced beer should have at least some bitterness to it.

We’re writing this just as many of the wet-hopped beers—or harvest ales, as they are sometimes called—are hitting the market, so we’ll admit that the gloriously pungent stench of hops has been top of mind of late. For those not in the know, wet-hopped beers are brews made with freshly picked, undried hop flowers that are massively aromatic, in addition to being bitter. It is, quite simply, hop heaven. Except if you’re Muni Waste drummer, Dave Witte, who, in this very column admitted he, “doesn’t like hoppy beers.”

To each his own. Truth be told, bitterness is an acquired taste. And there has been a growing trend to pump up the bitterness in craft beers due to the rising popularity of IPAs, double IPAs and the like. Hell, there are some barley wines (a high alcohol beer invented by the British) that have ridiculous amounts of hops in them used to balance the ridiculous sweetness. But balance is the key word here. Heavy-handed hop use can be awesome when done correctly. It can make a beer that both smells amazing (sometimes like really sticky, stinky resinous bud) and tastes delicious (with citrus, pine and even tropical fruit notes). However, hops needs sweet, sweet malt to keep it in check. Drinking an overly aggressively hopped beer is kind of like listening to a low-fi black metal album super-loud with the treble turned up to 11. Painful and fucking unpleasant.

But, if you find that you like the taste of hops, once you travel down that road seeking ever hoppier beers, you’ll want to keep going further and further. And you will certainly find no shortage of brews that will offer you new challenges. Bitterness in beers is measured in International Bitterness Units (IBUs). Most standard IPAs have between 50-70 IBUs. For sensitive types, such as Mr. Witte, that’s just too much bitter. (Belgians and stouts, some of his faves, are typically in the 20-30 IBU range.)

However, for serious hopheads, that’s like Kool-Aid. There are beers out there that boast 100-plus IBUs and lemme tell you, that is a whole lotta bitter, friends. Trust us. Rogue’s Old Crustacean Barley Wine is one of those beasts and it’ll leave you with a throat-coating wash of alpha-acid acridness that’s well, really fucking bitter and lingers for a long time. We’re pretty sure that kind of beer was not what the marketing geniuses at Keystone Light (which probably would have somewhere close to 5 IBUs) were targeting, but if ever a craft beer would give a person bitter beer face, anything over the century mark is certainly a good candidate. Proceed with caution.

Adem Tepedelen once chewed on a fresh-picked hop flower and found it to be unpleasantly bitter.