I’ve got this theory with hops. It’s not an original theory by any means.

I reckon people’s palates get acclimatised to hops and so they crave hoppier and hoppier beers. So is your mind now blown? Didn’t think so, but like I said, it’s not an original theory.

I figured I’d put the theory to the test this weekend with a trio of stupidly-hopped beers. Each of which destroyed my palate the first time I had them. Each of which made me think, ‘‘Jeez, what the hell sort of idiot drinks this?’’.

Here are those beers in escalating sequence of palate smashing:
1) Sierra Nevada’s Hoptimum
2) Green Flash’s Palate Wrecker
3) Mikkeller’s 1000IBU

I’ll be blogging about each of the beers on different days over the weekend. – tomorrow it’s the Palate Wrecker and Sunday is the 1000IBU. Today’s beer is the first one, the 2013 version of Hoptimum. I ordered this bottle from Slowbeer but a few weeks later found the bottlo up the road was also stocking it. Wollongong craft beer win! Anyway, I remember being a bit scared of this beer the first time I tried it. You can read about it here, but if you can’t be arsed, I can summarise. The hop flavour kept building and blew my head off.

This time around? Not so much. It was still a tasty beer – and highly alcoholic too at 10.4 per cent. There are loads of hops in it – Simcoe, Magnum, Chinook and some experimental variety exclusive to Sierra Nevada. But all those hops didn’t lead to me pulling a ‘‘hop bitterness’’ face like it did last time.

Back then I couldn’t work out why people would want to drink more than one. This time, I’m thinking about going up the road and buying a four-pack. More interesting was that my wife didn’t do the hop bitterness face either. She has a history of disliking hoppy beers, so maybe she’s becoming acclimatised to hops too.

Which, sadly, gives me one less excuse to avoid sharing my beers with her.