india pale ale

The great secret of hipsters is that they are K-mart shoppers like everyone else. That is: their lives lack meaning, and they fill them with objects, but they demand artisanal™ exotic and ethical lifestyle objects instead of the accessories the rest of the herd demands. The guy buying an 18-pack of Miller Lite wants only to be accepted by his social group, but the hipster is a social climber, and wants to appear unique, thoughtful, wise, “in the know,” different and unusual to his social group. That is because unlike in a healthy blue collar social group, where people want to demonstrate competence, hipsters need to show they are socially important which they do through flattering the predominant individualist opinion (SJW) and then doing something unpredictable. It is the conformity of non-conformity.

Next time you see a (giggin’, which I’m told is slang to mean without a plan) hipster cruising down the street in his Victorian moustache with 1970s porno beard on a penny-farthing cycle while texting on his iPhone 6HIV+, realize you are just seeing another shopper. He is in fact the most mainstream of shoppers, hoping that he can borrow the hipness and authenticity™ factor from a niche and extend it to the same rules of acceptance that apply to every other social group. As a result, hipsters represent a lucrative market because in their desire to be clued in, they are clueless. Everything for them is a signal, a show of appearance and lifestyle accessories for others, so they do not care about the underlying quality. They are not shopping for a Mercedes-Benz. They want a Hyundai with superheroes painted on it and a smartphone jack, which are actually easy and cheap to achieve. Hyundai puts out the same butt-stupid product as for anyone else but tricks it out, and the hipsters buy it for 30% over list. Flawless victory for commerce! This is no different than how they sell absurdly burly trucks to rednecks, or chromed-out cars to “the urban market,” or even how they make girly cars out of last year’s model for the clueless 20-something bar concubine market segment. In the case of beers, the IPA demographic has exploded as hipsters have realized they can socialize for hours just talking about their favorite IPAs, and marketers have realized that if you take average beer and dump grapefruit into it, you can sell it to hipsters for 30% over list.

That being said, the review of Lagunitas India Pale Ale is this: slightly better-than-average beer entirely concealed behind grapefruit juice flavor, this IPA has above-average alcohol and zero taste since you literally have no idea what the underlying beer tastes like. It seems like a thicker, meatier version of Budweiser with higher ABV (6.2%). It would not matter if it was horse urine because the grapefruit juice obliterates that. Luckily it is not absurdly sweet to counter the bitter citrus, but more likely, a yeasty middle of the road beer given a jolt of some of Everclear to bump it up to hipster levels. That way, they can drink alongside their wine-swiggin’ friends and still be about as drunk when it comes time to share a Lyft (via micropayments) for the trip back to their managed housing. There is simply no reason to pick up this beer unless you are buying it for the price, which at $5/22oz is acceptable in most areas. Unfortunately, it just does not deliver a pleasurable drinking experience, so unless you are picking this up for hipster cred factor, it is unnecessary like so many other things.

Quality rating: 2/5
Purchase rating: 1/5

23 Comments

Tags: alcohol, beer, hipsters, india pale ale, lagunitas brewing company, lagunitas india pale ale

My whole life has consisted of failure to appreciate the true depth of human stupidity. Most people are stupid, and they are both pretentious and unaware how transparent they are. Many of them spend time telling me “how it is” when they are so off-base that the disconnect from reality is onerous. But I digress: hipsters captured the beer industry and are posing at having knowledge while making bad beers.

Double Jack is one such bad beer. Monkey see, monkey do: hipsters realized that bitter beers with citrusy flavors were a signal our bloated and over-rated press corps was using to recognize quality, so they started making beers like Double Jack which signal all the right stuff but, because they are assembled of signals, have no internal structure or consistency and end up with the flavor of random junk. This beer immediately hits you with a strong grapefruit sensation, under which you will note a thin beer of anonymous flavor. The bitterness remains present, probably delivering rave reviews from idiots, but unlike a good beer, where all of the flavors work together toward some direction, it remains separate here. That may be a metaphor for this beer.

It is as if someone went through the reviews on Beer Advocate and highlighted all the key descriptive terms, then added those as features to an otherwise generic beer. None of the mild integration of yeast is here that you might find in a good beer, nor is there any overall flavor. Instead, there is bitterness, a yeasty backlash, a watery beer taste, then a slightly soapy beer flavor, and finally, the realization that this brew is surging with sugar and acid which means your post-party tacos are going to be a digestive challenge. It is not terrible like a mainstream American beer, but awful like lost potential: with someone who had a working brain, this could have been a great beer with these ingredients. Instead it is overpriced hype for hipsters to pass their time before smoking American Spirits among the ruins of their civilization. At 9.4% alcohol by volume, it at least allows a person to get decently tipsy on a bottle, but that does not make up for the wasted opportunity to not have drunk this beer, and to have purchased another one instead.

Quality rating:

1/5

Purchase rating:

0/5

5 Comments

Tags: beer, double jack, firestone walker brewing company, india pale ale

Lagunitas Brewing Company – Lagunitas India Pale Ale (2015)

Firestone Walker Brewing Company – Double Jack Double India Pale Ale