Years ago traditional (large) brewers created a couple of recipes and spent their entire time and energy attempting to replicate those beers over and over and over again, seldom selling or making anything different, this was seen as a positive thing. The argument was consistency and building a following for your particular beer, but as with many other things (such as religions, politics or food) the "spooky" thing was that people's "preference" was simply the beer that was available to them in their local pub, they seldom ventured far from home, i.e. not really an informed "preference" at all.
These days things have changed, many people have a preference for variety over consistency, and exhibit a low tolerance for the same old beer week in and week out. My local craft brewer (Siren) for example has been producing a series of beers over the last couple of years called their "suspended in" series (see picture above). The idea was to showcase different hops and ingredients on top of the same base beer and "suspended in X" was born, where X is different varieties of hops and other adjuncts (yeasts/ingredients), pretty much a new one every month. A wonderful idea and a huge success, this kind of initiative is illustrative of the revolution that's happened in brewing over the last 10 years, for those of us interested in understanding and experiencing different flavours and tastes, vive la difference!
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