... beer styles are starting to vary a lot more across the board. You can't really compare EC to WC anymore. There are also midwest breweries making big slap you in the face IPAs and such.
Beer "styles" have
always varied a lot across the board. The subcategories that have come into being in the last 20 years or so are all artificial anyway.
Any given "style" has always varied to one degree or another depending on who made the beer. In the case of the topic of the thread, they're
all IPA,
just variations on a theme. I have never liked trying to recategorize the "style" into separate East Coast/West Coast/ English definitions, because as has been pointed out, there are no real rules for this anyway...it is the whim of the brewer.
It's just us finnicky homebrewers (in the USA in particular) that seem to feel a need to define each and every variant of a "style" and call it a
new "style".
It's rather funny, actually.