Acadiana Haze IPA

Soft and pillowy from generous use of flaked oats and dextrin malt for body, Parish Brewing’s hazy IPA recipe is a great base for innumerable juicy dry-hop permutations.

ALL-GRAIN

Batch Size: 5 gallons (19 liters) Brewhouse efficiency: 63% OG: 1.065 FG: 1.015 IBUS: 45 ABV: 6.6%

MALT/GRAIN BILL

10.5 lb (4.76 kg) American 2-row 2.5 lb (1.13 kg) Flaked oats 0.5 lb (227 g) Simpsons Golden Naked Oats 1 lb (454 g) Dextrin malt

HOPS SCHEDULE

4 oz (113 g) Citra at flameout 8 oz (227 g) Simcoe at dry hop (day 5) 8 oz (227 g) Mosaic at dry hop (day 8)

YEAST

Wyeast 1318 London Ale III

DIRECTIONS

Mash in at 150°F (66°C) for 45 minutes. Run off into the kettle and boil for only 20 minutes. Don’t use any kettle finings. At flameout, add the Citra hops and whirlpool for 5 minutes before knocking out into the fermentor. Maintain the primary fermentation temperature of 68°F (20°C) and follow the dry-hop schedule. Chill 3 days after the last dry-hop addition and bottle or keg shortly after the bulk of the sediment has settled.

BREWER’S NOTES

Make sure your grist crush isn’t too fine. The high proportion of flaked oats can give you a stuck mash, especially without a beta glucan rest, which is to be avoided to maintain body. Expect to sacrifice some extract efficiency and adjust accordingly. Ideally, you want to use water low in sulfates and at least 150ppm calcium to accentuate fullness, rather than a crisp sulfate bite, in the body and mouthfeel of the beer. The shorter boil and avoidance of finings maximize haze. For a juicy beer like this, you don’t want to drop out those protein-polyphenol complexes in suspension. 2013 when he had a Heady Topper for the first time. The hoppy but not bitter IPA from The Alchemist was a revelation to his palate, he says, and he and the other brewers immediately started to figure out how to get those flavors into their beer.

He knew that the softer, fruitier, and more rounded flavors of a hazy IPA (still in the days before “New England– style” was a style) would appeal to his local drinking base, but convincing his distributors was another matter.

“They were selling the beer, but I wanted to sell more. So we changed the recipe internally, trying to make it as hazy and juicy as possible, in the days before people were really using those words, and we were the first brewery in the South to do this. It immediately took off, and we were able to introduce Ghost in the Machine, our double IPA. That put us on the map.”

He says that not being afraid at the time to go against the hoppy-beer trend is what led to his success. But there were learning curves.

The IPA Process

Early on, the brewery embraced hops oils, but Godley says there was a lot to learn when it came to using the substance that differs from whole cones or pellets.

“They are really aromatic and very volatile, meaning they want to turn into vapor and leave the solution,” he says. “The key is to treat everything very carefully to make sure they don’t leave the beer. That includes everything from fermentation, to carbonation, to packaging. So much depends on the temperature.”

Get him going on the topic, and Godley will tell you all you need to know about pressure and temperature and how it’s paramount to making sure the beers Parish makes hit their specs time and time again. The lower the pressure, the more readily the substances turn into gas and vapor. Higher pressure keeps everything in solution.

For temperature, he points out that for some of their hoppy beers, they don’t use a full boil. Why not? He has three main reasons. ▪ “We don’t want the oils to evaporate when in the beer. Higher temperatures, and they flash off and come out of solution.” ▪ “We don’t want hops isomerization. Hops have enough perceived bitterness and apparent bitterness, and for the consumers, it’s all bitterness to them. The point is to minimize all of that. We add the hops at a much lower temperature than boiling.” ▪ “Microbiological biotransformation is the most important piece. If you smell a bag of hops, it doesn’t smell like grapefruit or have that juice component. So why do we get grapefruit, or citrus, in our beers but not in raw hops? We were curious about that, and so we started doing some hops experiments.”

Because no one at Parish had previously worked at a brewery, they were left to their own devices to figure out just what was happening with hops in the beer. So they created a sample batch of wort, got a few 5-gallon carboys, and started experimenting with biotransformation— finding the ideal temperature for dry hopping—using Cascade hops. They stored one carboy at room temperature (70°F/21°C), another at about 60°C (15°C), one more at 50°F (10°C), and the last one in a refrigerator, at about 38°F (3°C).

The warmer samples were turbid, lively, and full of grapefruit-rind aroma. There were even some thin layers of krausen around the top of the carboys. The cooler samples were not as active and had more of a raw-hops aroma and taste.

“That was our light-bulb moment. We didn’t know what biotransformation was; we just knew there was something that makes it juicier. That’s how we make hops juice. We let the yeast do it for us.”

White Space

To stay competitive in a crowded marketplace and in an arena where a few breweries have closed recently, Godley is looking beyond beer. He’s seen the success beer makers such as Boston Beer have had with their cider and spiked seltzers and knows that to stay top of mind for drinkers, he will have to diversify.

To that end, Parish has released a lineup called “Sips” that tries to capitalize on the market. Essentially, Godley says, it’s a Berlinner weisse mixed with fruit

beer—more juice. It’s nothing new, of course, but it’s not really marketed as of a low ABV fruit-forward refresher. He’s done one with Riesling grapes and pear and another with tangerine and pink salt, with others on the way.

It’s just one way that this brewery, which has been charting it’s own path since day one, plans to make sure its future is secured.