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

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

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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.

English IPA

Yakima Chief

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.

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Total Wine

Samuel Smith India Ale

• $10.99 at Total Wine

• Location: Tadcaster, England
• ABV: 5%

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.

East Coast IPA

Yakima Chief

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.

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Drizly

Editor's Pick

Brooklyn Brewery East IPA

• $15.49 at Drizly

• Location: Brooklyn, New York
• ABV: 6.9%

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.

West Coast IPA

Stone Brewing Co.

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.

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Drizly

Stone IPA

• $12.09 at Drizly

• Location: San Diego, California
• ABV: 6.9%

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.

Double IPA

Dogfish Head

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.

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Drizly

Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA

• $13.99 at Drizly

• Location: Lewes, Delaware
• ABV: 9%

“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 IPA

Sierra Nevada Brewing

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.

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Drizly

Industrial Arts Wrench

• $14.99 at Drizly

• Location: Garnerville, New York
• ABV: 7.1%

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.

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