What Makes A Good Beer, Great? | Buzzword IPA

By: Naomi Kerchinsky

IPA’s are synonymous with the craft brewing industry. As a beer drinker, you learn to like IPA’s with time, and you almost earn your craft brewery badge of honor once you order one. IPA’s give you talking points amongst your friends as you can throw out a whole onslaught of highly touted IPA buzzwords like juicy, cloudy, westies, hazies, rattling off IBU’s as you sip away looking like a picture-perfect-craft-beer-drinking aficionado. And although these words may sound good to the ear, they say almost nothing. So what makes a good beer, great? Let’s analyze.

buzzword ipa in select stores, the taprrom, and online at troubledmonk.com/shop
BEER NAME
ABV6.7%
IBU61
SRM5.7

In a word, delicious!

Amarillo hops shine in the aroma that hits with orange citrus and a bit of dankness. The flavour is arresting with notes of gooseberry, black currant, and tropical fruit juice that ends with a herbal, resin character and a bit of honey and lemon. The special addition of Dextrose helps dry out the beer giving it less body. It drinks like an old-school IPA with a modern take that buzzwords aside, tastes delicious.

picture of buzzword ipa poured in apint glass with a golden hue color

Fun Fact: Garret proclaimed that Buzzword is the best beer Andrew has brewed this year (and he has made some kick-ass beers), so after extensive analysis, our analytical tasting department has concluded that this beer is indeed a GREAT BEER.

Can an Old-School-IPA keep mindshare?

Mindshare, a buzzword of its own, describes the amount of consumer awareness or popularity surrounding a particular product, idea, or company. And with the craft brewery industry continuing to boom, consumers are faced with more and more options when trying to pick a delicious beer. Makers and marketers of beer aim to create a masterpiece of words, colours, and designs to sway you to buy thier beer. Every time you decide to pick up a 6-pack of shorties or a 4-pack of tallies, you are hit with subtle and loud marketing attempts that beckon you to choose them!

Buzzwords allow producers to easily describe what they have created, and consumers to feel they are part of the club and getting what they want. The selection of IPA styles is getting so large they could, and probably have, filled their own novel. There are black and white, rye and imperial, session and milkshake, sour and double-dry hopped. However, there is a common expectation amongst all these styles, and that is quality. And although there are impressive New England IPA’s, buzzwords such as hazy and juicy, and a can that is a psychedelic explosion of colour, although may sound and look good, don’t necessarily mean quality. 

So how can we make a good beer be a great beer? Back at the drawing board, we thought what about making a solid IPA foundation with a modern twist. Simply the perfect combo of grain, yeast, timing, and temperature rate with fruity, aromatic, East-Coast allure. To get to this point, we have used our own power of analysis to simply improve our product performance year after year to create beverages worthy of sharing. But enough of the small talk. Go ahead and crack a can of Buzzword IPA, and be the judge of whether this is a good beer or a great beer. 

Bud and Marc in the office with a drawing board looking at different IPA buzzwords with a 4 pack of buzzwords tallies on the desk

Fake It Till You Make It

You don’t actually have to know about beer to SOUND like you know about beer. Just grab an IPA and talk with buzzwords, like, “It’s not too hazy,” or, “Is this double dry hopped?” or, “Oh, it’s really juicy!” If that fails, just say you’re in “the industry” and use words like “synergy” and “analytics”. We don’t know. We’re not in the industry.