What’s Happening to America’s Favorite Craft Beer Style?

In the early 2000s, West Coast IPAs — sometimes referred to, simply, as American IPAs — were the belle of the craft beer ball. Just consider the following stats, illustrated by former reporter J. Travis Smith in his story on the topic.

At the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) competition, a.k.a. the “big dance” of American brewing, 102 American-style IPA entries were submitted in 2005. Ten years later, in 2015, the submission number was up to a record-breaking 336 entries.

But a short time later, the craft beer industry started making a quick about-face.

As Smith’s same reporting noted, “In 2018, entries for the American-style IPA shrank, while the festival’s newest category, the Juicy or Hazy India Pale Ale (also referred to as New England-style IPA or Northeast IPA) garnered 391 entries. Last year in 2023, the number of West Coast IPA entries was 301 — more than 20 percent less than East Coast IPA entries.”

What’s behind this dramatic shift in the brewing industry? Have West Coast IPAs officially lost the craft beer popularity contest? And if so, where is the genre headed next?

In this podcast episode of season one of Know Your Stuff, senior staff writer Tucker Bowe asked executive editor (and resident beer nerd) Jack Seemer for a crash course in the IPA.

Want to go deeper? We’ve put together additional context and reporting on the subject below.

A Bitter Divide

Gear Patrol

As with many trends, it’s hard to attribute the shifts in IPA preferences to any single factor. However, the typical taste profile of West Coast IPAs certainly played a role.

West Coast IPAs highlight bitterness over any other flavor at their cores, which, as Colby Chandler, VP of Specialty Brewer at Ballast Point, explained, inherently presents an approachability challenge to anyone other than seasoned West Coast IPA drinkers.

Chandler noted that “bitterness is a sensation that your brain needs to learn is not a threat. It’s your self-defense against eating things you shouldn’t, and most people don’t get used to right away.”

It’s also important to remember, too, that the style itself has traditionally eluded formal classification, even though it’s considered something of a classic. In fact, the Brewers Association only recently deemed it an official category in 2023.

The Brewer Boredom Factor

Photo by Henry Phillips

Craft beer is often loosely thought of as beer born from a brewer’s interest versus cold, corporate calculation. And brewers eventually became interested in crafting something other than West Coast IPAs.

Their experimentation soon birthed the New England IPA, or NEIPA, which is more commonly known and listed as hazy IPAs on beer menus across America today.

Unlike West Coast IPAs, which introduce hops early on in the brewing process to extract the majority of their bitterness, many of the hops used for hazy IPAs are added later, allowing the flavor of hops to infuse in the beer with far less bitterness.

As Josh Bernstein, author of The Complete Beer Course and Complete IPA: The Guide to Your Favorite Craft Beer, told Smith, “The shiny-new-object phenomenon is a real thing. Hazy IPAs were the latest models, West Coast IPAs yesterday’s news.”

When Brewing Matched Business

Matt Ankeny

At least some of the shift away from West Coast IPAs was also influenced by desires for industry growth. The thinking was that beers with a sweeter front married to a subtler, bitter bite of hops would be far more approachable to novice craft beer drinkers, and beer sales quickly validated the sentiment.

Hazy IPAs also boast a unique quirk over their West Coast brethren that newer breweries looking to drive excitement and sales soon leveraged to their advantage.

Specifically, the trademark flavors of hops in hazy IPAs don’t preserve well, and as a result, the best way to enjoy a hazy IPAs is to drink it quickly after brewing.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

Savvy breweries leveraged this time crunch factor to fuel hype for hazy IPA releases, sparking a trend of beer fans eagerly lining up at brewery doors for a chance to buy and try the latest release.

However, the unexpected tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic would soon emphasize that the style was, in fact, a double-edged sword. Social distancing requirements and economic upheaval transformed brewing businesses built around in-person transactions into massive liabilities that required rethinking.

Refusing to Sit Still

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

Despite the distribution disruptions introduced by the pandemic, IPAs and hazies, in particular, still dominate the craft beer market.

In October, Los Angeles California based Highland Park Brewery took home the most gold medals in the Great American Beer Festival across nearly every popular style of IPA, including American-Style India Pale Ale, Contemporary American-Style Lager, American-Style Pale Ale and Juicy or Hazy Imperial India Pale Ale. As a result, it was also named Brewer of the Year by the festival.

Sierra Nevada is nation’s third largest craft brewery, according to the Brewers Association. It’s also the brand that first popularized wet-hop IPAs. Recently, the brand launched what it believes is the future of the hazy IPA.

The new release, Cool Little Thing, is the fifth release in the company’s Limited Hazy Series, which was created to push the boundaries of the hazy IPA. As the name hints, the new brew uses cryogenically frozen Mosaic hops in combination with three other kiln-dried hop varieties in hopes of offering a fresh-tasting IPA that can be enjoyed year-round.

World Beer Awards

But some signs are coming from various directions suggesting that other IPAs and beers might finally steal the limelight from hazies. As evidenced by the decline of West Coast IPAs and the rise of hazies, the allure of something different is difficult for craft brewers to ignore forever.

In February of this year, The San Fransisco Chronicle published an article titled “Hazy IPA beers are so popular that brewers are sick of it.“

And in August, a relatively obscure IPA from Japan was named the “World’s Best IPA” in the prestigious 2024 World Beer Awards.

Oskar Blues

Even in the last several weeks, another iconic American Brewer, Oskar Blues, announced it was bringing its former cult favorite session IPA back from the dead under a new mantle, Dale’s American Easy IPA.

Non-alcoholic beer sales are also booming in America, as evidenced by inference and data. Corona Cero, a non-alcoholic brew made by the beer titan AB InBev, was the official beer sponsor of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. According to Chicago-based Circana data, the category also recently grew by 20.2 percent over a 52-week period.

But even that burgeoning category can’t resist the appealing and yes somewhat bitter flavor of hops that is the calling card of all IPAs, and neither can we.

That’s why we recently named Deschutes Fresh Squeezed Non-Alcoholic IPA as one of the best new alcoholic beers to try this fall.

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