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Jul 20, 2023

The Complete Beer Guide to IPAs: From Hazy to West Coast and More

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The IPA is the most popular craft beer style in America. Here, an excerpt from Josh Bernstein's "The Complete Beer Course" breaks down our beloved hoppy liquid.

The following is an excerpt from Joshua M. Bernstein's 10th Anniversary Edition of The Complete Beer Course, which is available now.

When I first started drinking craft beer, India pale ales exerted a gravitational pull that sucked me into their bitter orbit — their sweet and bitter smack matched by aromas of citrus, tropical fruits or pine resin.

The early 2010s marked the fragrant India pale ale's rise as America's favorite beer style. Though it originated in England, stateside brewers have forever altered the formula, turning down the malty caramel notes and cranking the hops to 11. The modern American IPA became a gateway craft beer, recalibrating palates accustomed to light lagers.

In recent years, breweries have made IPAs more inclusive and broadly appealing by dampening bitterness and amplifying flavors and aromas of citrus and tropical fruit, using oats and wheat to make IPAs as opaque as orange juice — and sometimes just as fruity. The latest craze might be IPAs with haze, but they’re not the final word on the style. Here's the lowdown on these hopped-up brews.

Hops are hardly a one-trick pony. Their preservative property was noted in the 1760s when, according to Amber, Gold & Black author and historian Martyn Cornell, brewers were advised to add extra hops to beers being sent to hot climates, notably the Caribbean and, yes, India.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Army and the East India Company had troops, officers and civil servants stationed in India. The pale ale first appeared in the seventeenth century and the earliest incarnations were lightly hopped, but as the years passed and exports increased, Cornell explains, the lighter-hued ales grew hoppier. By 1835, this highly hopped style was using a new moniker: East India pale ale.

Over the ensuing decades, IPAs in England started vanishing, the style languishing on life support until the modern craft beer movement. Distinguished English-style IPAs do endure, and many feature hops that deliver earthy floral aromas, a fruity underpinning and a lingering bitterness that's backed by malt-derived flavors of caramel and biscuits.

Since 1758, this British brewery (the oldest in Yorkshire) has made its name with balanced ales brewed with well water drawn from 85 feet underground. The clear and dry India Ale is brewed with whole-leaf Challenger and Golding hops for an earthier, more floral scent and there's a civilized flavor of toasted bread spread with zesty orange jam.

As the renown of India pale ale spread across the Atlantic Ocean, domestic breweries began producing IPAs brewed with American hops and barley grown in the United States and Canada.

The style started stirring with the release of Anchor Liberty Ale in 1975 and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in 1980, both of which used floral, citrusy Cascade hops. The following year, Sierra Nevada released its highly hopped holiday beer, Celebration Ale, an IPA in everything but name.

The American IPA was abuzz and by 1989 popular and prevalent enough that Denver's Great American Beer Festival decided to award the category's inaugural medals. In the 1990s, IPAs become growth engines for brewers nationwide leading into two geographic camps. East Coast IPAs embraced the style's British DNA, mutated by American verve and innovation. Enduring examples from the ’90s are balanced, with a sturdy spine of malt sweetness, full body, fruity or citrusy hop character, and solid streak of bitterness to boot.

Brooklyn Brewery originally released East India Pale Ale as a summer seasonal in 1995 and bridged the distance between the United Kingdom and the United States. The medium-bodied IPA, tasting of toffee and biscuits and sharp herbal bitterness, became a big hit and went year-round in 1996.

During that era on the West Coast, in particular California, breweries started eschewing sweet caramel malts for a lean, dry scaffolding designed to showcase the hops. These West Coast IPAs paired not-immodest alcohol (around 6 or 7 percent ABV) with revved-up bitterness, notes of biscuit and toast, and aromas that conjured a stroll through a supermarket's fruit department: grapefruits, pineapples, oranges, lemons, mangos, lychees. The beers featured new hop varieties developed in the Pacific Northwest, such as orange-y Amarillo and piney-fruity Simcoe.

When Stone released this IPA for its first anniversary in 1997, the fashionable styles included ESBs, pale and amber ales, American-style hefeweizens and fruit beers, not a nearly 7-percent ABV IPA tuned to 77 IBUs with Chinook, Columbus and Centennial hops providing an arrest-ing pop of grapefruit and pine.

America is not a nation known for restraint. Hence, the double IPA was preordained. Simply put, it's a bulked-out IPA, loaded with heaps of hops to add extra bitterness, aroma or flavor.

The modern double IPA arose in 1994 when Vinnie Cilurzo was working at the now-shuttered Blind Pig Brewery in Temecula, California. He created an anniversary beer by doubling the hop bill and upping the malt by around 30 percent. Cilurzo became Russian River Brewing's brewmaster in 1997, and two years later he created one of the country's first commercially produced double IPAs in the piney and resinous Pliny the Elder.

Bitterness became big business, and drinking IPAs became a dare as expressions pushed the very upper limits of flavor and drinkability.

"I knew instantly that the idea of continual hopping was now a reality," Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione writes in Brewing Up a Business, creating a smoothly piney and citrusy IPA, rich with caramel, that was "outrageously hoppy without being overly bitter."

Hazy wraps drinkers in a plush blanket instead of pushing them away with spiky pine needles, part of a marked shift in the American IPA. Northeast breweries began downplaying bitterness, playing up the fruity, tropical flavors and aromas of new hop varieties such as Citra and Mosaic. Oats, wheats and even lactose provided a smooth runway for the New England IPA, a fruity ride across a hazy landscape that looked and tasted an awful lot like orange juice.

I prize that fresh vibrancy over crowd-pleasing candy sweetness, as modern hop varieties deliver blueberries, mangos, coconuts, peaches and guava on a platter where bitterness plays a supporting role. Feel free to grab whatever is fresh and local to you.

In 2016, Jeff "Chief" O’Neil turned a pre-Civil War textile mill into Industrial Arts [and] Wrench is by far the breakout star; it's a delicious juxtaposition that's both hazy yet bright, a pithy citric symphony of Citraand Mosaic hops.

The so-called Belgian IPA blended expressive Belgian yeast (think: fruity aromas of apples, bananas, or pears and perhaps cloves and peppers) with excessive hop character.

Midnight-colored black IPAs balance bitterness, citrus, tropical fruits and maybe pine with a kiss of chocolate and roasted coffee complexity.

The brut IPA broke wide in 2018, becoming the fiercest wind fanning the hop fires but the style burned bright and fast. Fizzy excitement fell flat, and the brut IPA exited from the mainstream almost as soon as it arrived.

It's the antithesis of a hazy IPA: an aromatic, amply bittered IPA as dry, clean and crisp as freshly laundered and ironed clothes.

Like milk stouts, these IPAs are laced with milk sugar to lend sweetness, and the creamy effect is often boosted with the addition of vanilla beans and fruit. The similar smoothie IPA has lactose and enough fruit purée — strawberries, pineapples, mango, etc. — to stock a juice shop.

A red IPA relies on a grain bill heavy on caramel or crystal malts. The grain gives beer a rich, sweet flavor and a hue straight out of Satan's wardrobe.

When rye is used in beer, the grain can add complexity, sharpness, subtle spiciness and a finish as dry as a desert riverbed. Rye does have its drawbacks, and it rarely dominates a grain bill.

The white IPA is a hybrid ale that bridges the divide between hoppy IPA and a cloudy, wheat-driven witbier. Other breweries ditch the spices and citrus peel and just make wheat IPAs, and the smooth and well-hopped Lagunitas A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ might be the style's poster child.