I’M NOT ASHAMED TO SAY IT—I LOVE IPAS.

It may not be “cool” because it’s such a popular family of styles, but give me the day-to-day choice, and I’ll grab a hazy New England–style or citrusy and piney West Coast–style IPA over most other beers in the fridge. As Camper Van Beethoven sang in “Life is Grand,” I say this at the risk of falling from favor with those of you who have appointed yourselves to expect me to say something darker.

It’s easy to hate anything that reaches the level of ubiquity of IPA, and I’ve heard the curmudgeonly groan of old school brewers and beer writers as they look through a brewery’s tap list and see 75 percent of the taps consumed by IPA. But let’s not let that love of style diversity cloud the basics here— there’s a reason those taps are full of IPA, and the reason is that a lot of beer drinkers love to drink them.

What I love most about the IPA family of styles is the incredible diversity it represents. Soft and fruity? Yes. Dry and bitter? Yes. Rich, malty, and ester-driven? Yes. Pale? Golden? Orange? Amber? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Sour? Depends on who you ask. The term “IPA” is both meaningless as a descriptor and almost univerally understood as shorthand for “hoppy”—yet another term made meaningless by the incredibly broad range of its applications.

But as a lover of the agriculture behind beer and the broad spectrum of flavors possible, I can’t help but love that “hoppy” is no longer is a synonym for “bitter.” For some reason, the incredible flavor complexity of the hops plant was reduced, for much of the history of beer, to that one predominant note. The rise of New England–style IPA is as much an embrace of the creative agricultural lineage of hops and power of the plant as it is a testament to brewers’ vision—the two go hand-in-hand, and one wouldn’t happen without the other.

To read more about how hops are bred and those flavors developed, check out Chris Colby’s story “Hops Breeding: Better Hops for a Bitter Tomorrow” (page 77). If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to make a flavorful IPA even on your stovetop, read Drew Beechum’s piece, “Homebrewing Hazy IPAS” (page 66). Curious about how pros use lactose and brew “milkshake” IPAS with vanilla and more? We’ve got you covered.

For this issue, we embarked on one of the most ambitious review programs we’ve ever done. We received more than 300 beers, tasted them all, put 144 in front of our blind panel to review, and now share full reviews of eighty-three of them here in the issue (with sixteen more in score-only format). As always, we share the best and most interesting scores here in the magazine, but beerandbrewing.com hosts all of the reviews, with more than two thousand reviews by our blind panel of BJCP and Certified Cicerone judges. If you’re curious about a beer, it’s as easy as using the search bar at the top of the site.

Whether you love IPAS or not, we hope you enjoy this issue—we made it for you.