Beer's solid cousin, bread, is based on four basic ingredients: flour, water, yeast and salt. And yeast you can get from the flour itself, if you're patient. Salt is there entirely for flavor - it doesn't help the yeast grow; in fact it retards the yeast. And for flavor you don't need much, but you'll miss it if it's not there.

But imagine if, one dark day, some asshole baker somewhere decided to cover up the taste of his shitty flour with a ton of salt. At first, people were like "Eww. So salty!". but eventually, the idea caught on because some people started treating really salty bread as a challenge. "Woah, so salty! How unusual! This bakery is Pushing The Limits!" Not too long after that, hip bakers everywhere wanted to make the saltiest bread they could. They started using different kinds of salt: rock salt! fine salt! sea salt! salt scraped from the ball sacks of sweaty football players! And that's all anyone made for years and years.

But people finally figured out that salt is not the point of bread, it's a component.

That's how I feel about IPAs (and all their over-hopped relatives), which currently take up a good 75% of all the beer shelf space in my local supermarkets.

/rant