The first time I opened a growler of Farmhouse Cider from Frecon Farms in Boyertown, PA, the smell of it—the powerful, ripe, barnyard stank—was almost enough to clear a room. It was remarkable. A smell so strong that it seemed to have a weight and a color. Every instinct said to back away slowly, but what did I do? I drank it.

As it turned out, the cider itself was amazing. A fascinatingly complex mix of super-dry cider crispness, lingering sugars and a woody solidity, which was why I’d been drawn to it in the first place. Which is why you should be perking your ears up, too. Because right now, hard cider is where craft beer was a couple decades ago. It’s big business ($1 billion in sales in 2015, and still growing), but still a niche thing. Though its early years were dominated by a couple of large operations (like Woodchuck Hard Cider and Angry Orchard, the cider arm of the Boston Beer Company), the craft side of the scene is still wide open and largely made up of farmers, weirdos, brew-nerds and mad scientists all trying to find that next big thing. The hard cider version of the mass-market IPA.

In the process, they’re making a thousand delicious, strange and terrible things, everything from ridiculously sweet and powerful ice ciders (like Neige Premier, which comes in at a rocking 12% ABV) to fruited, spiced and barrel-aged experiments like Missouri’s Perennial Artisan Ales yearly blends, wild farmhouse sours and hopped hybrids like Woodchuck’s Hopsation that cross the line between beer and cider.

In fact, craft cider is, at this moment, interesting in exactly the way that craft beer has become dull. I mean, you crack a beer and the one thing you can guarantee? It’s going to taste like a beer. Hoppier or yeastier, more or less sour—excepting those bizarre outliers like $20,000 stunt beers served in taxidermied squirrels, a porter is a porter and a lager is a lager and they are, if nothing else, recognizable for what they are.

But cider? No way. They’re still an adventure, varying wildly from style to style and brand to brand. Where, once upon a time, the only thing anyone knew about hard ciders were that they were sweet, gross and an intermediate step for hard-drinking sorority girls moving on from Zima to Natty Lights, now they are equal in intricacy to the geekiest of craft beers and, really, could give wine snobs a run in terms of composition, complexity and terroir.

Take, for example, another Pennsylvania cider: Little Round Hop from Big Hill Ciderworks. It’s a hopped cider, using the Big Three brewers’ hops—Centennial, Cascade and Columbus—plus a little bit of citric, lemongrass sting to cool out any bitterness. The result is a dry, clean, almost beer-y cider that you can put away by the pint and brag about to your craft beer buddies. And as a bonus? We’re talking calories like a bottle of Budweiser, a drinkable 5.5% ABV and, like all ciders, totally gluten-free.

It’ll also taste nothing like the next bottle down in the cooler, and that’s really the reason why you should be drinking hard cider right now. Because there will never be another moment where cider is as fascinating as it is right now—where the options are more varied and the weirdness more approachable.

And remember: there was a time in this drinkable world before the IPA, too. Someone had to be first through that wall—the first guy to say, Hey, maybe not EVERY American beer has to taste like dirty water. For hard cider, this is that time. So be brave. Try something new.

Drink up.