Boasting a "ruinous effect on your palate," the ale typified the decade's "extreme" beer movement that saw craft brewers shredding recipes to produce strongly flavored versions of long-established styles, from imperial pilsner and double white to triple bock and cherry-flavored quadruppel. Beer fans glommed onto other audaciously named brands (see Victory Hop Wallop), as a previously arcane brewing term (international bittering units) found its way into barroom lexicon.
Nearly unheard of at the start of the decade, by 2003 double IPAs would have their own judging category at the Great American Beer Festival. Today there are more than 750 varieties listed at BeerAdvocate.com.
_ Pabst Blue Ribbon (1844)
Though introduced in the 19th century, PBR came to define the entire 21st-century hipster generation - an anti-beer consumed as an ironic cultural protest against both the slick advertising of Big Beer and the yuppiedom of microbrews.
_ Dark Lord Imperial Stout (2002)
Few people are lucky enough to have tasted this majestically strong (13 percent alcohol), oak-aged, vanilla- and coffee-spiked treasure.
And that's the point. It's the ultimate cult beer, released in an extremely limited supply by the Munster, Ind., Three Floyds Brewery to an eager, loyal corps of lathered beer freaks.
The surrounding publicity is priceless and helps support the company's other brands, a clever marketing tactic emulated by hundreds of other small breweries. (See Weyerbacher Brewer's Select Series, Flying Fish Exit Series.)
_ Dale's Pale Ale (2002)
For their first 20 years, American microbrewers did everything they could to distinguish themselves from mainstream gulpers: no corn or rice additives, no bikini models, and definitely no cans.
