Today is IPA Day! Which, yeah, doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense. It’s a little like asking someone if they’ve watched that “American Idol” show on the teevee.

But, dangit, I’ve got a blog post to write! So today we’re going to talk about IPAs. The thing is, despite being insanely popular in the US, there are quite a lot of things people say about the style that are just plain untrue.

I covered some of this a year and a half ago, talking about the history of the India Pale Ale. There’s been an awful lot of myths passed down from beer lover to beer lover, leaving beer historians to angrily shout on their blogs to little effect.

Martyn Cornell has an excellent post today, titled More IPA myths that must die on #IPADay, a followup to last year’s Four IPA myths that need to be stamped out for #IPADay. I can see how some of these get started, because they offer a romantic history to many peoples’ favorite beer style. Just because something is romantic or ideal doesn’t make it true, of course, and so when you lift a glass of IPA today, please do so with an accurate conception of history.

Of course, here I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Pete Brown’s amazing Hops & Glory, which is regrettably hard to find in the US.

Now that my slightly-more-preachy-than-intended history rant is done, let’s talk about the IPAs of the present: namely, The Jam #2: The Answer, our latest one-off beer that, wouldja look at that, also happens to be an IPA!

You can still get a growler of The Answer this week, but its prognosis after that is grim. Your options are: tomorrow at our now-weekly Friday retail hours, 3-7 at the brewery or Saturday at the Bidwell farmer’s market, 8-1. Last week it was gone before 5 on Friday and by 10 on Saturday, lasting that long only due to the early morning rain. Lest you think we’re sitting on kegs and kegs of the stuff, cackling in a miserly fashion in between wet slurps directly from a tap, consider that I know it was gone by 5 because I tried to get some and it was gone.

Have a good week, and enjoy a good IPA today!