A few years ago I moved to a bigger city where the craft beer selection got quite a bit broader from where I was living previously. For a while it was like being a kid in a candy store with so many different beers to choose from.
Then as I got more experienced with beer I started getting more of an idea of the different styles that are out there, and what each of these styles tends to be like. What I noticed after a while was that if I tried 2-3 different examples of the same style, while I could quantitatively say that one was better than another, for the most part they would all taste similar.
So this brought into question the 'craft beer obsession' that I had been riding for a while. I began to think that, maybe, at some point a chocolate stout is pretty much just a chocolate stout, an ipa is pretty much just an ipa, and whether you're drinking an ipa from here or there, you're basically getting the same experience.
So with that said I wonder:
- is there any type of objective measure of the variation amongst specific styles?
- outside of esoteric beers that aren't commonly available, is 'trying as many as you can' really worth it?