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INDIA PALE ALES DOMINATE TODAY’S CRAFT beer landscape, with 10 or so styles laying claim to the name. Now there’s one more: the ‘clear hazy’ IPA. San Diego’s Ballast Point Brewing Co pioneered the category, which upset plenty of beer nerds and confused others, with the February 2021 release of Big Gus. ‘IPA is a familiar acronym to beer drinkers, regardless if you’re a novice or a total nerd,’ says Dan Lamonaca, owner of Beer Karma Bottle Shop in Brooklyn, New York. That’s why so many brewers (and their marketing departments) label beers with these three letters, even if they don’t really fit the IPA mould. For example, Lamonaca says people who come in looking for sour IPAs are ‘not really looking for something that mirrors an IPA but definitely want something with bold flavours.’
Flavour, not appearance, is also at the heart of the somewhat absurd clear hazy term. The signature attributes of tongue-numbing bitterness and intense resinous hop aroma in clear IPAs give them a reputation of being hoppier than their hazy IPA counterparts that display less aggressive hop characteristics like soft mouthfeel and rounded tropical hop aromas. In truth, clear IPAs and hazy IPAs use about the same amount of hops per barrel. It’s not how many hops are used in brewing, but when in the process they are added, that determines the flavour and category of the final beer.
‘With historical English IPA, hops were added during the boil, and then the wort was run over more hops in a hop back,’ says Mitch Steele, author of IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes, and the Evolution of the India Pale Ale and brewmaster and co-founder at Georgia’s New Realm Brewing. The boil addition extracted maximum bitterness from hops, as alpha acids become bitter iso-alpha acids at temperatures over 82.2°C. Meanwhile, the cooler, postboil hop back preserves aromatic essential oils and converts fewer alpha acids into bitter compounds.
Bitter, earthy English IPAs remained the definitive style until an improved understanding of hops and access to newly bred American hops like Cascade met the nascent craft beer world’s search for more flavourful ales. This confluence catalysed the inception of the American IPA in the 1970s and ’80s with beers like Anchor Liberty Ale.
Steele, who was formerly the brewmaster at Stone Brewing, an iconic US West Coast IPA producer outside of
San Diego, says, ‘The Stone “standard” hop regimen was like many West Coast brewers’ practices.’ It consists of a boil addition for bitterness followed by a whirlpool addition – a post-boil step similar to the old-school hop back. Once fermentation is complete, more hops are added to maximise flavour and aroma in a process called dry hopping. These three hop doses and the varieties of hops used create the recognisable dank grapefruit and pine aromas with substantial bitterness of West Coast IPA.
The hazy New England IPA is made by dialing back the initial bittering hops and tweaking the dry-hopping timing. Here, hops are added at the height of fermentation, instead of waiting for yeast activity to finish. This allows a chemical interaction between hop compounds and the yeast called biotransformation that creates the juicy, tropical flavours that beer enthusiasts flock to.
Selecting bold, high-quality hops is central to the hazy style, too. Breeze Galindo, brewer at Other Half, an archetypal NEIPA brewery in Brooklyn, says hop varieties such as Strata contribute ‘bright grapefruit, creamy pineapple-strawberry’ flavours to Other Half’s hazy beers. Instead of introducing these hops in the boil, the team uses whirlpool and dry-hopping additions.
By adding less bittering hops during the boil, brewers also set up the conditions to create a lasting haze. Hops with lower concentrations of bitter alpha acids also have higher levels of polyphenols, says Scott Janish, author of The New IPA and co-founder of Sapwood Cellars Brewery in Maryland. Polyphenols bond with proteins in malt that are especially abundant in NEIPA brewing to create haze so stable that the beers can go through a centrifuge – typically used to make brilliantly clear beers by spinning out solids – and still come out distinctly opaque. In contrast, the hop schedule of clear IPAs reduces the interaction between these proteins and polyphenols, inhibiting the creation of haze. Any bonds that do form and create haze can be filtered out before packaging.
Further tinkering has led to IPAs named for specific characteristics or brewing techniques, instead of hop regimen. Adding lactose – an innovative or abominable move, depending on who you ask – creates a milkshake IPA. Yeast can’t ferment this milk sugar, so it winds up in the finished beer, lending a full, creamy mouthfeel. The milkshake moniker becomes even more appropriate when lactose is added to an already hazy NEIPA, but every now and then you’ll see it thrown into a clear IPA, too.
There are other beers on the shelf that are IPAs in name only, like session IPAs. These are brewed to a lower alcohol by volume, typically around 4–5 per cent. Could these be called pale ales? Sure, but it seems the pale ale name just isn’t as catchy.
Trendy cold IPAs, which date back to 2019, borrow heavily from lagers. Cold refers to the style’s cooler fermentation temperature, which is usually reserved for lagers. Sometimes, brewers even use lager yeast in place of typical ale yeast. The idea is that the flavour will be lighter and more refreshing than a traditional IPA.
Clear hazy IPAs might be the next big thing, or they may fade from memory as quickly as the dry and bubbly brut IPA to make room for the next creative spin a brewer decides to call an IPA. One thing is for sure, they won’t be the last brewing innovation to use those three recognisable letters.
PEOPLE ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE TERM IPA. THAT’S WHY SO MANY BREWERIES LABEL BEERS WITH THESE THREE LETTERS, EVEN IF THEY DON’T REALLY FIT THE IPA MOULD.