Am I the only person that feels like ‘dank’ is not a valid term to describe an IPA? Unless I misunderstand the origin, it comes to us from pot culture, where I guess dank is a good thing. I’m not sure how it could ever be a good thing because all it does for me is conjure up thoughts of dirty dish water and moldy basements. I’ll give you piney, grapefruity, resinous, or even juicy, but I just can’t wrap my head around dank!
It’s funny, because I feel like Brett’s characteristic ‘horse blanket’ could be put in the same category. That definitely not a flavour most would consider appealing, though I’ve had plenty of Brett beers where one of the prominent flavour components is what I would call ‘straw’, and what I assume many allude to when using the horse blanket descriptor. When you really get into it though, I feel like horse blanket is a term that you can easily demonstrate to people, help them understand it, and why it is actually a bad sounding description for a good characteristic. I don’t think you can do that with dank. You could put three IPAs in front of me, one dank and two not dank (do not dank IPAs actually exist now? does the term get applied retroactively to all of them? I’m really asking here) and I doubt I’d be able to point to one and say “THIS is the dank beer”. Maybe I’m wrong and I’m open to being proven so, but until that happens I’m sticking to my guns: dank is a ridiculous beer descriptor.
I feel like its a completely legitimate term. When people say “dank” they are referring to a similar smell of potent weed. Being that hops are the genetical cousin of weed, it doesnt seem far fetched to me. Any hops that seem to evoke sticky, resinous qualities are usually described as “dank”. I’ve even seen lists ranking the dankest hops. The reason why it maybe seems to be everywhere is popular hops like columbus which is definitely in that region. Also, the most recent harvest of galaxy seems extremely dank to my palate
I can’t think of any other beer flavour or aroma descriptions that I can’t connect with the term. I even absolutely get the ‘horse blanket’ Brett characteristic, as weird as that descriptor is. My problem, I think, boils down to this: if we sit down and you hand me an IPA that could be described as ‘dank’ and I (or others) can’t make the connection to the term, then the connection isn’t a good one.
I just came upon this, and it’s March 2022, so this was written a long time ago. I was searching for a definition of “dank IPA.” I entirely agree with Gremlyn. It’s a very weird term to use for beer. Yeah, I get the supposed connection to pot. But it’s still a misuse of the word. (And no, I wouldn’t call the smell of potent weed “dank,” either.)