[electricslpnsld]

This might have been true a few years ago, but even in my middle of the road rust belt city you can get a huge variety of beers now. There are entire breweries dedicated to sours alone! Even within the IPA genre the crazy hopped to death west coast IPAs from the early 2010s seem to be getting pushed out by New England IPAs, milkshake IPAs, and a smattering of super weird stouts.

[randomdata]

> middle of the road rust belt city you can get a huge variety of beers now. There are entire breweries dedicated to sours alone!

Heck, I live in a small rust belt town of 2,000 people and we even have a brewery dedicated to sours alone. Travel 20 minutes up the road to the next town over, with a population of not even 1,000 people, and you'll come across a major – as in their production capacity is pushing the limits of what can be reasonably considered craft – craft brewery. Although not necessarily always available, they have 35 beers in their catalog. I'm not sure any of them resemble the west coast-style IPA we're talking about. If you include hazy, milkshake, etc. takes on IPAs then 9 of the 35 are considered IPAs. Still not a lot of emphasis on IPAs in general.

As an aside, this "rural" craft beer industry is rather interesting. The primary business model seems to be set up production where operations is cheap and then ship the product into the city. That sour brewery is basically a tech company, selling the vast majority of their beer online. Although that major craft brewery I spoke of does put a lot of effort into beer tourism, attracting people to their facilities, as well.

[mrbrowning]

The Midwest is far ahead of at least the West Coast on this. I saw much more variety of brewing methods, beer styles, and flavor profiles when I lived in St. Louis than I do here in the Bay Area. A lot of the great breweries from the other side of the Rockies (Left Hand, Odell, Bell's, etc.) are either difficult or impossible to find products from here, too.