MAKE IT Lone Pine Diamond Unicorn Double IPA

Diamond Unicorn is one of our staple New England–style double IPAS. It’s brewed with extra oats for a silky mouthfeel and highlighted by Ella and Vic Secret hops.

“Anyone can dump seven poundsper-barrel of Citra in a dry hop, but the nuance is in the yeast and water,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s the same ingredients. We’re finding nuanced ways of getting more out of them.”

ALL-GRAIN

liters) 72% our experiments are very calculated,” Madden says. “We are drifting a lot when we’re making new beers.”

For example, the brewers have been diligently tweaking yeast-pitching rates within the Cannon series, finding out how they affect not just the esters produced but also the haze level. Eventually, they decided that slightly under-pitching the yeast forced an increase in the levels of esters, complementing the hop-driven tropical fruit flavors.

Lone Pine also pays careful attention to how much hop particulate remains in its IPAS, as too much of it can cause astringent hop burn. That’s why the brewers are enamored of their new centrifuge, which has not only improved yield but cleared out a lot of the vegetal matter that causes the astringency. Madden says they’re also careful not to let the beer sit on late-addition hops too long. Four days is his ideal period; he dry hops two days before the beer reaches terminal gravity, then overlaps the dry hopping with a 48-hour diacetyl rest. Certain highly hopped beers, such as OH-J, then benefit from a few days’ rest in the cans before the brewery releases them. For Madden, the sweetest spot for most of Lone Pine’s IPAS is a week or two weeks after they’re canned, when the hops have smoothed out.

Under the Microscope

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For the most part, American brewers are working with roughly similar raw materials, so these small procedural choices are everything to Madden.

“Anyone can dump seven pounds-per-barrel of Citra in a dry hop, but the nuance is in the yeast and water,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s the same ingredients. We’re finding nuanced ways of getting more out of them.”

Getting more out of ingredients is getting easier, he says, thanks to better scientific understanding of processes such as biotransformation. Even just a couple of years ago, much of the knowledge about how yeast and hops worked together to impact beers’ flavor was being passed in anecdotes and whispers from brewer to brewer. Now, it’s an important area of research for brewing chemists.

Madden is on the board of the Quality Control Laboratory at the University of Southern Maine, and the brewery sometimes uses that lab to drill down in the beer analytics to a molecular level. When it comes to “doing the legwork” on beer quality, Lone Pine has seen the return on its investment. Paying for a dissolvedoxygen (DO) meter or lab tests on yeast-cell counts pays off, Madden says, when customers know they can trust your one-off releases as much as they can your flagships.

That’s how they’ve been able to build a business on mainstays while also creating buzz—such as the Great American Beer Festival bronze medal last year for Chaos Emeralds Double Ipa—for special releases.

“Once you gain the trust of your consumer, anything you come out with from that point forward,” Madden says, “there’s that inherent trust you’ve built that ‘Hey, this is going to be good.”