An IPA with all the flavor and none of the bitterness
An IPA that few would have imagined 10 years ago is now available for curbside pickup at Adobe Creek Brewing, in Novato. Called Character Zero, it’s more interesting than it sounds. The 6.6-percent alcohol beer is a hazy IPA that is elaborately hopped with several New Zealand varieties, making it explosively aromatic with tropical fruit and citrus notes.
But here’s the catch: It’s barely bitter, at least according to the scale of international bittering units, which runs zero to 100 (with lively discussion about its relevance beyond double digits). Most IPAs clock in at between 60 and 90 IBUs — but not Character Zero. It runs closer to, well, zero — though brewer Jonathan MacDonald isn’t sure how close. He says he doesn’t have the ability to measure IBUs (as larger breweries often do).
What we do know is that bitterness mainly comes from hops added before or during the boiling stage, and MacDonald only added hops after the boil was over.
By adding the fragrant flowers after the beer has cooled, brewers may extract their flavor but very little of their bitterness.
Bitterness was all the rage a decade ago in super-sized IPAs, but brewers are increasingly looking to bypass bitterness in their IPAs — a counterintuitive brewing twist that
began a few years ago. The emergence of the hazy IPA accelerated this pivot (to use a term especially fashionable in COVID-era beer writing) from bitterness. Hazy IPAs are characterized by juicy fruit flavors and a smooth, silky finish, with little bitterness. Character Zero — which, for the record, is not the first low-to-noIBU beer — takes that concept to its max.
Brewers have already done the opposite, exceeded the theoretical ceiling on the IBU
scale. It was 15 years ago or so when IPAs took their place as the flagship style of the craft beer revolution. As happens with so many good things in the beer world, brewers got all wound up with more, bigger, better, bitterer.
So, they threw in more of everything. I recall watching IBU levels go up and up, into the 80s and 90s, to match rising alcohol levels. More alcohol means more residual sugar, and bitterness does a good job of balancing what would otherwise be cloying sweetness.
Eventually, someone made an IPA that exceeded 100 — what is considered about the point beyond which humans cannot taste, or perceive, any more bitterness. But state- ofthe-art instruments can measure bitterness to much higher levels. I remember marveling when I first saw an IPA measuring 120 IBUs, and around 2011, a brewer at Lagunitas toldme they had made a test beer in the lab that went several hundred IBUs.
Unsurprisingly, brewers ran with the concept, and it was fun for a moment. Dogfish Head, in Delaware, hit 685 IBUs with its HooLawd. Other breweries, such as Carbon Smith, Flying Monkeys and Mikkeller, reported more than 2,000 IBUs in beers of their own, though it isn’t clear that all these beers were tested with lab instruments; sometimes, brewers simply calculate the IBU level based on hop dosage and boiling time.
Adobe Creek’s Character Zero, according to the brewery’s Instagram, is “double dry hopped with Sabro, Nelson, Motueka, and Waimea hops. Clocking in at 6.6% abv it is loaded up with notes of tropical coconut, orange, tangerine, lemon-lime, and a touch of sour diesel.”
I can’t say I know what diesel smells or tastes like, but I think it’s safe to guess it’s not bitter.