Ska Brewing in Durango, Colo., annually collaborates with Venture Snowboards on a Ska-themed snowboard that might feature its logo, dapper skeleton mascot, or a new beer.
In January, brewery president and cofounder Dave Thibodeau hit the slopes with a Ska snowboard that outlived its advertised beer: Moral Panic, a bone-dry brut IPA that debuted in 2018 and disappeared in late 2021. A fizzy, fragrant, Champagne-inspired IPA couldn’t hack it in a world gone hazy.
While snowboarding, Thibodeau ran into a woman riding another Moral Panic board, one of five created. They high-fived. “She was like, ‘That was my favorite beer. I can’t believe they don’t make it any more,’” Thibodeau says. Her words cut deep. “To this day, it’s still one of our favorite beers that we’ve made.”
The IPA is American craft brewing’s version of fast fashion. Soon after new styles or techniques are developed, trendsetters are imitated nationwide and around the globe, as breweries capitalize on the latest craze. Like that Shein shirt, few IPA spinoffs endure, the rest tossed into a trash pile.
Once popular IPA variants that emphasized rye, wheat, or wild yeast have mostly vanished; session IPAs lost their low-alcohol luster; and abrasive imperial IPAs faced a harsh truth. “In retrospect, it was a bit of a mistake to try to make beers as bracingly bitter as we possibly could,” says Matt Brynildson, the brewmaster at Firestone Walker Brewing in Paso Robles, Calif. “There’s no wonder they didn’t hold on as a long-term trend.”
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