Renaissance Beer: Reimagining the West Coast IPA

With a little help from our friends here in California, we’re adding a fresh chapter to our West Coast IPA story.

WEST COAST IPAS ARE the old dog that brewers keep teaching new tricks. Here we are, more than 20 years since West Coast IPAS gave fresh momentum to the craft-beer revolution, and innovation is still leading the way.

This was impressed upon me more than ever last year when we made three different IPAS in collaboration with our friends at North Park in San Diego, Beachwood in Los Angeles, and Alvarado Street in Monterey, California. Each of these brews incorporated Incognito—a liquid hop extract that has been most notably popularized by Kelsey Mcnair at North Park.

At Firestone Walker, we’d already taken the leap into Cryo hops with our Hopnosis Cold IPA. Now, with Incognito, we were learning how to master yet another exciting new way of maximizing hop aromas and flavors.

These lessons didn’t go to waste. In fact, they helped inspire our next big thing: Firestone California IPA, a new-age West Coast IPA that incorporates both Mosaic Cryo and Citra Incognito. We’ve omitted specialty malts, leaning entirely into pale malts and a touch of wheat. I think the addition of Citra Incognito helps take the aromas to yet another level. This isn’t your dad’s West Coast Ipa—but it’s not off the wall, either. We’ve aimed to create a modern classic.

What’s cool is that Firestone California IPA is landing in our new Beer Before Glory IPA mixed-pack, along with three other milestones from our West Coast IPA brewing journey over the past two decades: Union Jack, Luponic Distortion, and Hopnosis. I see this mixed-pack as the story of the West Coast IPA, as told by Firestone Walker.

The craft-beer business has changed considerably since we first brewed Union Jack in 2006. The old way was to create flagship beers and a core portfolio, and then you brewed these same beers year after year. Today, there are breweries that rarely brew the same beers twice—every beer is a one-off.

At Firestone Walker, this has taught us to become more comfortable with rebooting recipes and processes. We can improve upon old recipes, or we can completely reinvent them with new hop varieties. At the same time, we don’t want to become a house of one-offs. There’s a balance to be found between continual innovation and building beers that make a mark and have staying power.

This is how we’ve landed upon Firestone California IPA in 2024. In a lot of ways, this beer is closer to Luponic Distortion than something more recent, such as Hopnosis. It’s also strongly influenced by No Vacancy—the collaborative West Coast IPA we brewed with Alvarado Street for last year’s Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Fest. We’ve also created our own way of handling Incognito, by injecting it into the wort stream as it’s headed into the fermentor. Besides Incognito, other available advanced hop-aroma extracts include YCH702 and Salvo. Although these flowable extracts were not purpose-built for adding to the fermentor, we learned through our collaboration brews that they can have a positive impact when added a bit later in the process than they were intended.

This beer represents the best of everything we’ve learned, not only from our own brewing experience, but also from collaborating with some incredible breweries.

The renaissance of the West Coast IPA is upon us, thanks in no small part to our collective spirit of innovation. Where will the West Coast IPA go next? We’re about to find out. ■