What’s the hoppiest thing you can remember tasting? Unless you’re like us and you eat a nice bowl of hops soaked in malt extract for breakfast, your answer is probably a double IPA. These brews are the creative playground for what’s possible at the extremes of bitter beer, and brewers have been testing those limits since the late 1990s.

After the massive rise in popularity of IPAs in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, brewers adopted the “bigger is better” mindset for some of their IPAs, brewing them to be more bitter, more alcoholic, and generally bolder in every hop descriptor you could think of. They added more bittering hops, more aroma hops, and a lot more dry hops–sometimes adding multiple additions at this stage–to maximize the holy hop in all its citrusy, piney glory.

When Vinnie Cilurzo released the first batches of Pliny the Elder in 1994, he was brewing for a company called Blind Pig in Temecula, CA. There were likely other brewers that made IPAs we would now call “double IPAs” before ‘94, but Pliny has stood the test of time as a phenomenon all its own. This bracingly bitter, yet remarkably drinkable beer uses six different hop additions of three varieties, leading to a complex, pungent, and deeply resinous hop profile that you’ll dream about for days after cracking one (Cilurzo provided a scaled homebrew recipe to Zymurgy Magazine in 2009, so if you’re into homebrewing give it a try).

In classic American style, the IPAs of the early 2000s led to an arms race in hoppy beers. Brewers claimed beers with IBUs north of 200, 300, and even 1000. There’s significant marketing going on here, since studies have consistently shown that the human ability to taste bitterness has a ceiling somewhere around 120 IBUs. One of the early and notable players in the double IPA game was Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, who brews his 120-Minute IPA, a massive beer clocking in around 18% depending on the release, by hopping a lengthy 120-minute boil continuously. To make this happen in the early days, he bought and rigged an arcade game with a moving belt to slowly drop the hops in rather than standing over the boil kettle for two hours.

Double IPAs since the early 2000s have followed many of the trends that standard-strength IPAs have: they can be dry, sweet(er), hazy, milky, and even fruited. The first time you order a pint of one of the OG Double IPAs, though, you’ll experience a whole new kind of relationship with hops. They show their full, unadulterated, bitter, juicy, and resinous colors in these beers, which might take some getting used to, but they’re incredible when done well.