My role at All About Beer has recently expanded a bit, beyond overseeing our reviews system and managing the beer side of our World Beer Festivals (etc.), to include a new column. It’s slowly|amusingly turned into me taking deep-dives into parts of the beer world I don’t like.

Fruit IPAs, coffee beers (I’m an outlier here) and, most recently, quick-/kettle-soured beers. My beer-loving wife, normally on board for pretty much anything (except smoked beer), has been like: You’re on your own. Fruit IPAs, coffee beers, quick sours: couple dozen at a time. No help. Our sink’s usually drunk. The recycling bin contents makes us look like odd pirates.

Don’t get me wrong. Some folks love these. But I cannot for the life of me say that my heart beats faster when a new kettle sour appears on the shelf. Fruit IPAs still, generally, just make me wish for normal IPAs (ideally loaded with late hop additions). But the newer coffee beers were, surprisingly, pretty great.

(I’ve also been threatened with having to review hard sodas. … Not really. I volunteered.)

Coffee beers: I’ve been jaded by so many iffy ones in the past. But this time around our top picks were stellar—and all from SoCal: Modern Times City of the Dead (barrel-aged coffee!), Stone Americano Stout (seamless) and AleSmith’s new Hammerhead Speedway. All glorious, and making me regret bad words I’ve spoken about coffee beers in the past. (Stone’s Mocha IPA has been a standout new release in the time since then.) With cold-brewed additions and boutique-roaster collaborations like never before, we’re just starting to approach peak coffee.

A few+ years back, I had the opportunity to sample a wide range of different Brazilian beers down in Curitiba, in the Paraná state of southern Brazil. I’d been flown down as, essentially, an ambassador of RateBeer, which was (at the time) one of the main congealing elements of online beer culture in that region of the world. I’ve never met such passionate homebrewers. And, being there to witness that nascent craft beer scene—operating, like many international beer scenes of late, on an accelerated timescale courtesy of lessons learned in the U.S.—well, it felt a little bit like getting a glimpse back in time to an earlier part of our own beer culture.

You could taste potential. You could tell where things were headed.

And one of the main highlights of that trip had been Wäls. Pitch-perfect renditions of tripel, quadrupel and bière brut, in a beer culture more generally inclined to German styles. Various batches of their Petroleum, a chewy imperial stout, were equally on point. Despite Wäls’ sale to AmBev last year and (more especially) Brazil’s current economic crisis, it’s encouraging to hear from Brazilian peeps still planning to open breweries once their economy’s upright, and also to see vestiges of that core spirit of Wäls appearing in places like southern California.

Everyone has their preferences, and while my profession and temperament have me drinking pretty much everything when it comes to beer styles, I tend to gravitate towards just a few if I’m not on deadline. Pale ales and IPAs with a ton of late hop additions comprise a good bit, with beer like Cellarmaker, Modern Times and Firestone Walker’s Luponic Distortion hitting the spot lately. There is always room in this somewhat reasonably sized belly for hefeweizen, like one of those wizard bags you can store a universe in. And anything even vaguely saison.

If you are a saison and you walk into our house, you get what you deserve.

Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee has been doing some really nice saisons lately, with a Classic Saison that’s true to its name and a Noble Cuvee Dry Hop version that’s essentially a bottled meadow. While a couple recent Prairie beers just didn’t do it for me (Ape Snake: you’re all over the place; Phantasmagoria: you could’ve been someone!), returning to their Standard, a hoppy farmhouse ale with Motueka hops, reinstilled any and all faith. Others to look for in this department: Casey Brewing and Blending (Colorado) has been gaining deserved fanfare. Monkish in SoCal has been dropping numerous mics. Cory King and his Side Project: ditto.