Yup, It's an IPA

The beer is 5% ABV and it has 15 IBUs. Existential question: is it an IPA?

The answer doesn't really matter (and wouldn't be definitive in any case). But whatever you think of this trend in nomenclature, it's pretty good evidence that "IPA's" new meaning is settling into place. It's been just a couple of years since I first made the case that, at least to customers, "IPA" doesn't have anything at all to do with beers shipped from Burton to India.

To the average drinker, slapping the word "India" on a label communicates a very specific, easily-understandable meaning.  It's shorthand for "saturated in the flavors and aromas of American hops."  Gigantic IPL, for all the ways it wasn't an IPA, instantly met the expectations I'd had--it was decadently perfumed and soaked in Simcoe and Citra hops.

The beer in question is brewed by pFriem, and I've written about it before. Over the weekend, I stopped into the brewery on a trip out the Gorge and was delighted to find it on tap again. It definitely fits the bill of "saturated in the flavors and aromas of American hops." In this case, if I had any problem with the name, it's the "sour." It's lightly acidified via kettle souring, and this gives it a tartness akin to citrus fruit. Add the fruity hops on top, and it really has the effect of making it more fruit-like. Many fruits have an element of acidity, but we don't think of them as "sour" because they're balanced by sweetness. In this case, it's the hops that sell the fruitiness, adding their flavors and aromas to that snappy tartness. It's like a scoop of mandarin-melon sorbet.

The IPA part--that's wholly defensible. The one thing I didn't mention so much back in 2014 was how IPAs have been decoupled from bitterness. IPAs have become so flavor-and-aroma-centered that people have become habituated to relatively low-IBU IPAs that nevertheless have deeply saturated hop flavors. pFriem's IPA has all that flavor, and it's actually accentuated by the acidity. The "sour" part of the title may scare some people away, but I doubt few people complain that it fails to meet their expectations for an IPA.

When I wrote that post back in 2014, the comments were not entirely supportive of the thesis. I become ever more convinced that it's happening in front of us, and this is a good case in point.

IPAs as National Tradition

It is sometimes hard to appreciate the phenomenon of American brewing while experiencing it first hand. It's far more enlightening to travel to Copenhagen or Dublin, as I did earlier this year. In both places, you find good beer bars and breweries that function as perfect facsimiles for the ones you find in the US. From inside a Mikkeller or Galway Bay pub it's nearly impossible to tell that you're not in, say, Brooklyn.

One of the strangest experiences on my visit to Dublin was bar-hopping with John "The Beer Nut," and stopping off in one of those Galway Bay pubs for a pour of their double IPA, Of Foam and Fury. John's craft beer organization Beoir voted it the best beer in Ireland, and yet it was absolutely indistinguishable from an American double IPA. It is an bizarre experience to travel to one of the world's most famous beer-drinking cities, one I have revered distantly my whole life, and find that the brewers there are imitating the beers I buy a two-minute walk from my home.

A taplist in Copenhagen

The point is that it's difficult to appreciate how massive America's impact on world brewing trends are right now, or to see what "American" means unless you view it in a world context. After yesterday's post, I got a fair bit of feedback on Twitter and via email that makes me think these facts could do with a bit more elaboration.

IPA is Shorthand for the American Tradition
The countries (or sometimes regions) that have given rise to the myriad beer styles that we still brew all have certain characteristics in common: they make beer from unique ingredients and use  distinctive or unique brewing techniques. British ales use certain barley, yeasts, and hops, and are packaged on cask. Belgians use sugar and bottle condition. Czechs use distinctive barley and hops and decoction mashing.

And Americans? We have very distinctive local hops, and we have developed ways of brewing that maximize the flavor and aroma potential of these hops.* Many people have commented that all you have to do is slap "IPA" on a beer and it will sell, and the result is that we have a ton of substyles that are confusing and unnecessary and make the term "IPA" meaningless. I would argue the opposite. That word is a designator for an approach to brewing--the American approach. Just like "Belgian" is an adjective as much for a philosophy of brewing rather than a portfolio of styles, we should think of IPA now almost like an adjective for American brewing.

The influence is profound. Just in recent days I have mentioned how a Bavarian-born and -trained brewer dry-hopped his decocted maibock with Citra hops and how Germans now consider dry-hopping kosher according to Reinheitsgebot. I wrote about how Japanese brewing might one day develop into its own thing--though now they're making a lot of American IPAs. When Patrick and I were at Zoiglhaus recording our forthcoming podcast, German-trained brewer Alan Taylor mentioned how he adds Magnum hops in the whirlpool in one of his German beers (can't recall if it was the kolsch, the helles, or the North-German style pils he makes). Czechs are making IPAs, Mexicans are making IPAs, and now we'll see if Berliners can be persuaded to drink IPAs. I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

Belgians have something in common with Americans in that they are keen to brew beers from other regions. But these inevitably go through a cultural filter so that the beers that come out the other side look only Belgian and nothing like the beers that inspired them. Americans certainly can brew straight German lagers or British bitters, but they tend not to. Instead, they usually dose their beers, like Taylor did, with more hops along the way. All these different IPAs are the manifestation of breweries who have adopted a way of thinking about and making beer, and who apply them to everything from 4.5% to 10% beers and pale to black beers (with everything in between).

Styles definitely change and mutate. Very few of the beer styles made today look like the version of that style made fifty or a hundred years ago. And national traditions mutate, as well. Germany, where decoction was invented, has been quietly moving away from the practice. I have no doubt that American hoppy ales will continue to evolve and change.

What I would not expect is a move away from the intensely flavorful hops we grow, nor the techniques brewers have developed to goose them. And this is largely because Americans have gotten so excited about these beers. In fact, the rise of the modern IPA and the supercharged growth of breweries entering the market happened at the same time. (When IPAs became the best-selling beer in 2011, there were about 1800 US breweries; five years later there are over 4600). I'd argue this is no coincidence.

And all of this is highlighted by the way American IPAs are being brewed around the world. They are precise imitations of our own IPAs, using the same ingredients and processes. To the brewers making those beers, these are manifestly new and unique, unlike anything on the market. IPAs were once a British style, but go buy a bottle of Samuel Smith's India Ale and taste test it against a Breakside or Gigantic. You will rediscover the Americanness in that experiment.

________________________
*Pedant note. Yes, it's true Americans did not invent the basic practices of post-kettle hopping and dry-hopping. But they have never been used the way the Americans are using them--particularly since Americans continue to develop these techniques (hop torpedoes etc) in ways that are new embellishments to crank up the aromas. Czechs did not invent decoction mashing, either, but their embrace and development of its use is now distinctly Czech.

An American Story

Lew Bryson is tired of IPAs:

Speaking as a guy who’s been preaching the beer gospel for over 30 years, I’m feeling short-changed. Damn it, I didn’t put up with the abuse of my co-workers and relatives, or spend thousands of dollars on questionable beers from brewers with six months’ experience during the buildup, just to get the opportunity to drink hoppy, hoppier and hoppiest, no matter how good those hops are! I’ve been at beer bars where over three-quarters of the taps were pouring some variation on an IPA, or at least something that called itself an IPA. There are a lot more taps at bars now than there were back in my salad days, but I happily recall places with only five taps that had more variety. 

I think this case is overstated--barroom variety isn't as monochrome as all that--but it's true that IPAs have conquered America. But to Lew, who seems to take a slightly proprietary approach to the development of beer in the US ("We did this for you. Don’t squander it."), I would rejoin: what did you expect?

When countries develop their beer culture well enough to begin to introduce their own styles, it inevitably leads to a narrowing in the marketplace. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, the more people in a region grow to love beer, the less they love diversity. It's not like German brewers can't make abbey ales. They can't sell them. The same thing is happening in the US: breweries make IPAs because Americans love love love them.

And this is a good thing! The beers Lew describes are the slow adaptation to American tastes. We started out trying to make the styles popular elsewhere. By tiny increments, the beers began to drift. US breweries were using these strangely potent (and initially derided) local hop varieties, and instead of trying to conceal them, they started to make them the focus. They adapted further by figuring out new ways of brewing with them, and further still by changing the water, grist, and yeasts to showcase them. All of this went hand in hand with the public's embrace of these evolving hoppy ales. If you go back and look at the way German, Belgian, Czech, and British beer styles develop, you see parallel evolutions. In any country that embraces beer, you should expect to see both the creation of new styles, and a local preference for them.

Thirty years ago, it would have been unimaginable to think that the US would be the most dynamic brewing country in the world, author of a whole new chapter in beer history. We would not be able to conceive that these American inventions would be brewed in London, Prague, and Berlin. And yet here we are.

Lew's complaint is not new, and it is often framed as a sad form of degeneration. But you almost never hear the same people complaining that the beer culture in Bamberg or Bruges or České Budějovice is bad because the choices are too few. They are routinely hailed, correctly, as paragons of beer culture. As the politicos would say, the prevalence of IPAs is a feature, not a bug.

Enjoy it--

On the IPA Cutting Edge...

No brewery is doing more to push the evolution of IPAs forward than Breakside. (See here, here, and here for recent discussions.) Well, the evolution continues apace. In a recent blog post, head brewer Ben Edmunds writes about some of the things they've been working on recently:

Back to the Future IPA (aka BTTF) is the third release in our series of rotating draft-only IPAs for the year. BTTF is a departure from the previous two releases in the series: Tall Guy IPA and Rainbows & Unicorns. Those two are beers we’ve brewed a number of times and have more or less “set” recipes. By contrast, Back to the Future is a beer that always changes, both each year and– in this year’s incarnations– each batch.

Since I am a Serious Journalist (TM), I felt that just quoting extensively from that blog post was inadequate. For true value-added content, you need Ben to elaborate on some of the things he mentions in that post--and I'm just the journalist to cut-and-paste the replies he sent to me via email. All kidding aside, this is cool stuff and worth your attention. Even a beer so dominated by a single ingredient can be inflected by other ingredients and techniques. Ben discusses the way flaked grains, water treatments, new hop varieties, and yeast strains can transform an IPA. Read on...

Ben started by noting what the last iteration of Back to the Future experimented with:

Specifically, we used BTTF 2015 to explore some questions we had about the use of flaked grains in IPAs. We also trialed a much softer water profile than we normally use with our IPAs. As with any trial, there were parts of the 2015 version that we liked and learned from, and elements that we didn’t. The things that we liked are now incorporated into many of our other hoppy beers. Both Lunch Break and Tall Guy use a good portion of flaked barley in the malt bill, for example. The hops that we used BTTF 2015– Ella and Azacca– have both found a home in our hop schedules for several other beers, including Hop Delivery Mechanism and Imperial Red.

To which I asked about both the flaked grains and soft water.  Ben comments:

I think there is a lot of emphasis amongst brewers these days, especially East Coast brewers, on flaked grains. They tend to use a lot of wheat and oats. We'll use all three (as well as flaked corn and flaked rice, in other beers) in hoppy beers, but I think we tend to use flaked barley more than the other flaked grains because of its more neutral character. Flaked wheat and flaked oats are great but tend to be very characterful; flaked corn (which we use in our Coconut IPA) and flaked rice (Rainbows & Unicorns) are also great. They all help round out body with some light grain character that allows hops to shine.  

Softer water is still a subject of debate within Breakside. Generally, we have come to favor a slightly Burtonized water profile for most of our hoppy beers. When we first opened, I used a classic Burton ratio (10:1 sulfate-to-chloride) on most hoppy beers. Over time, we've backed off on that in an effort to allow the finish to come off a little softer and let the hop flavor linger into the aftertaste. Most of our core beers are still 5:1 sulfate-to-chloride or higher (Wanderlust, Breakside IPA, and IGA are all pretty Burtonized at 8:1), but many of the new recipes we've worked on go down to the 3:1 range. We have tried a few pub beers with a very soft water profile (no Burtonizing or a chloride-heavy profile), and that gets a little flabby for our own preferences. BTTF uses the 3:1 profile, which, in my mind, optimizes hop flavor and a refreshingly snappy finish.

Water is something I need to address seriously at some point. When I was speaking with Nick Arzner on Friday, he mentioned this issue as well. He'd just done a collaboration with Great Notion. He also mentioned that they go for heavy chloride in their water to soften the palates of their "New England" IPAs. This, Nick suggested, was one of the most important ways these beers were distinguished from West Coast IPAs. 

Ben continued in his blog post discussing the newer hops they've been using.

This year, we’ve revived BTTF in the same spirit, brewing it with combinations of hops that we think have a lot of promise and using this beer as an opportunity for us to explore some “new directions” in making IPAs. Distilling it down to 3 key areas, this year’s Back to the Future IPAs are exploring the following territory: Pairing a new and interesting hop (Topaz, Lemondrop, Idaho 7) with hops that are already beloved (Mosaic, Citra, and Ella). Each batch of this beer focuses on a different combination of those hops. The first batch, which is currently on the market, is heavy on Topaz and Mosaic. The second round of brews will be mainly Citra and Lemondrop. The final batches– the ones that will be hitting the market in August– will use Ella and Idaho 7.

I know that the brewers at Breakside have novel hopping regimes based on whether they think a hop is "punchy" (spiky, sharp flavors) or "soft." I asked him how these new hops behaved.

Topaz is a lot like Galaxy but without the intense stone fruit character; it comes off as a little waxy/petrol the way many Southern Hemisphere hops do, but it has some nice underlying tropical notes. Lemondrop is very citric, as advertised-- kind of like a super Cascade. And Idaho 7 is reminiscent of a softer Centennial-- lots of lemongrass and Fruity Pebbles for me. Culmination uses it a lot in their Urizen Session IPA. I'd say that Topaz is very punchy, Idaho 7 pretty punchy, and Lemondrop soft. 

Finally, Ben talked about the interplay between yeast strains and hop expression. He writes that Breakside is "using a different yeast strain with this beer this year, and it seems to respond to American hops differently than our normal house ale strain." This is not just a matter of the way different flavors inflect each other, like blending colors. There's an actual biochemical process that happens in which hop compounds are transformed during fermentation--an issue I've written about recently. Ben expanded:

I think that the most interesting part of this whole experiment might be the use of a non-traditional "West Coast" yeast, much in the same way that the East Coast guys are favoring English yeasts for their IPAs. There's some real digging to be done about yeast selection and the future of American IPA.

So

Wait, There's Corn Sugar in My IPA??

When I posted a link on Facebook to the hop-degradation piece I did earlier this week, Pete Dunlop wrote:

No mention of the corn sugar, huh? Hmmm.

And then a few minutes later, in response to another question...

I don't have an objection to this post or to the use of dextrose. I just think it's important for people to understand how dextrose is being used in their fancy IPAs. I've discussed it with Jeff. I'm baiting him to write about it.

Well, consider me baited, Pete. 

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Sugar is Kosher

It turns out using sugar is a somewhat under-discussed widespread practice, so let's discuss it. I think we should begin with the obvious question: who cares? The reason Pete even brought it up is because the use of sugar in beer was originally and ignorantly tarnished by craft brewers who considered its use purely a way to save money, with the added bonus of making the beer taste cheap and thin. In fact, sugar is a big part of the brewing traditions in Belgium and Britain, and it's used to enhance those beers. 

It does a few things. Because sugar is easily digestible by yeast, it thins a beer and adds crispness. This is a huge benefit in stronger Belgian ales. If you brew an all-barley beer to eight or ten percent strength, it will be both heavy and sweet. There are just too many unfermentable sugars in barley to get really attenuated beer. Let's take Duvel at not-quite random. It's a burly 8.5% beer, but it is incredibly lithe and drinkable. In fact, the name is a reference to that ease of drinking; like a Devil, it coaxes you into over-indulgence. Brewers at Duvel do a multi-step mash to get the most fermentable wort possible, but they also add sugar, perhaps 15%, and this pushes the beer to a finishing gravity of 1.5 Plato (1.006), which is astonishing. A regular pale ale will finish out at 3 Plato (twice as sweet), and an all-grain 8.5% stout might finish at 5 Plato--more than three times as sweet, and with a dense body. 

In British ales, sugar does something like the opposite--it allows very light ales to express their ingredients cleanly and clearly. Since a cask bitter or mild is made with so little malt (these beers are in the 3-4% range), they can't pack much flavor punch. By adding sugar, it lifts them up and exposes them a bit more. Hops are always perceived as stronger in thinner beers--it's why Belgian ales so rarely have much hoppiness--and in cask ales, that means those lovely East Kent Goldings really pop.

Sugar can even add its own flavor component. British brewers use a form called "invert sugar," where the sucrose molecule has been cleaved into glucose and fructose—two highly-fermentable forms of the sugar molecule. In Britain, invert sugar comes in a range of colors and can, in beers like stouts and milds, add color along with high fermentability. I interviewed local homebrewer Bill Schneller for my forthcoming book, because he's a big fan of invert. He told me, "You just can’t get the flavors of invert from crystal malts. [Invert gives you] richer color, different dried fruit flavors than crystal alone, plus a drier, easier-drinking beer than if you use all crystal malt. It adds complexity and flavors you just can’t get anywhere else."

What's Dextrose?
There are lots of sugars out there, and they'll all work in a beer--sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose (of course), and so on. Some of them are disaccharides like sucrose and maltose, composed of two monosaccharide molecules (like fructose and glucose). Dextrose is a starch-derived monosaccharide that comes from, ta-da!--corn. It's chemically extremely close to glucose. 

We have this second bias, probably a good one, against corn sugar. Even the phrase "corn sugar" can be easily turned into an epithet. But the use of corn in beer is not only old and completely respectable (I commend you now to Stan Hieronymus' forthcoming Brewing Local, which will fully and permanently exonerate our only native grain), but it's something even the Belgians do. Indeed, in many breweries you'll find this little side-vessel that you might mistake for use in decoction, but is in fact called a cereal cooker because it mashes corn. No less than Rodenbach does this. You want to tell Rudi Ghequire his beer uses cheap additives? Good luck with that. 

Dextrose is the most common sugar used in modern IPAs (I think), but I wouldn't bet even a nickel that it's the only sugar. Either way, it's fine.

Sugary IPAs
Okay, so now we come to the point of all this: do American brewers regularly dump corn sugar into your IPAs? You bet they do, and good thing. This is no secret. When I interviewed Vinnie Cilurzo for The Beer Bible, he readily described why he used sugar in the grist of Pliny the Elder when he first made it 13 years ago:

“If you want to know the difference between it and a barley wine, it’s got 3.5-4% crystal malt in it.  So having a low level of crystal malt you really let the hops come through.  They’re not being muddled by the caramel character of the crystal malt.  Also, we’re using a lot of sugars in the fermentables, dextrose sugar, so it’s drying the beer out and giving the beer a nice light, dry body.  Super crisp, but really dry yet really bitter.  And like you said the malt just lays the foundation and it’s just there to keep the hops in check without being sweet, malty, biscuity.  It’s a real simple malt bill and the hops are the shining star in that beer.”

That is about as clear a description of why brewers do this. When you're making an American IPA and you want a bit of caramel malt for sweetness, which can inflect hop flavor, you don't want to add unnecessary body. That's especially true if you're getting up there around 7% or more, when it's impossible to keep the sweetness and body at bay without sugar. The whole thing about American IPAs is that they're a vehicle for all the flavors and aromas of hops. Everything else--water, yeast, and malt--is there just to serve the hops. Sugar is invaluable, just as it is in strong Belgian ales, in this regard. 

So enjoy your IPA and know that it is in very good beer company. Corn sugar's fine!

Engineering an IPA That Lasts

Source

This has been in the inbox for far too long, so let's have a look at it now. Grant Golden sent me this question, and it is the key that opens a box of fascinating information.

"I was wondering if there is any chance you might be interested in writing about or even just shedding some light on what about Breakside's IPA woos judges in almost every major beer competition in the states. I think it is a solid built-to-style American IPA, however, I just can't see how it continues to shine through and dominate when there is a plethora of other very, very well-constructed IPAs out there."

As it happens, I've discussed this with Breakside's brewer, Ben Edmunds. In the months before Breakside won GABF gold for its flagship IPA, the brewers had set about re-engineering that beer so it was more shelf-stable. What people love about the best IPAs are their fresh hoppiness, which is that combination of aromatics, flavor, and bitterness and how those elements play off the malt bill and (in some cases) fermentation characteristics. One of my favorite quote comes from a technical paper on aging beer, and the writers put it this way: "However, the constituents of freshly bottled beer are not in chemical equilibrium. Thermodynamically, a bottle of beer is a closed system and will thus strive to reach a status of minimal energy and maximal entropy." 

The entropy happens faster in IPAs, and the qualities that make the best ones so good are also the qualities that dissipate the quickest. When you put an IPA in a bottle, you have a very narrow window in which it will still taste as it does on tap at the brewery, and then it begins to go through a change. If you haven't prepared the beer for how it's going to taste at 30, 45, and 60 days as it goes through those changes you're left with an empty, hollow space where the flavor and aroma used to be. Here's Ben on that process:

“You have 20 days of brewery freshness and then it begins to degrade. If you bottle condition, you might buy yourself a week. But by day 30 you’re dealing with a fundamentally different beer than you had at day one. When you’re building these beers you should know what that beer will taste like at day 30. You can lament that ‘oh, it doesn’t taste like it used to.’ But knowing what that oxidative curve is and what those flavors will be is really important. Some hop aroma and flavors that oxidize are more pleasant than others.” 

There's no research into the process Ben describes, and they've been approaching it through trial and error. One of the reasons Breakside's various IPAs do well in contests is because they taste better when flights are finally poured out for judges, weeks after brewing, than other beers. That's because the brewery isn't just trying to make the best IPA at day 15, but one that is still toothsome at day 90--which requires an entirely different recipe. Other breweries that ignore the changes their beers go through may be disappointed in contest results, but they're essentially being graded on different beers than they sent.

As we spoke, Ben described the sensory change their Wanderlust IPA goes through (it's not their flagship, which is just called "IPA") by way of description.

“If you take Wanderlust as an example, the first fifteen days is all Mosaic and then it goes through this adolescence and between day 15 and 30 and what’s happening is this weird interference with Mosaic dropping out, but around day 30 the Amarillo starts to come forward and it becomes this new beer around day 30. When you have that beer from day 30 to 45, it has a little bit of tropical dankness, but essentially all that Mosaic character is gone and it becomes more bright, citrus peel, marmalade. I like to think how a hoppy beer is going to last on a shelf, and I don’t mind it going through this evolution.” 

He added that in their experience, some hops have "more legs" than others. Not surprisingly, they're some of the classics--Cascade and especially Centennial. Amarillo are good as well. 

So there you go. Commercial breweries have different sets of challenges depending on when and how they sell beer. If you're a brewpub that can move a flagship IPA through the pub in a month, you don't have to think about this stuff. If you're sending it out in bottles, particularly if you're sending it throughout the country, you have to consider what violence age and oxidation will wreak. Or, I suppose, if you're sending it to Denver to win a medal in the IPA category.

And the Next IPA is . . . ?

Each year the homebrewing magazine Zymurgy polls its readers about their favorite beers. The results are in most ways no more interesting than the average Thrillist article. What do you care if a bunch of people you don't know say Bell's Hopslam is better than Lagunitas IPA? What is notable is how thoroughly IPAs dominate the list. Here's the top ten (of the list's top fifty):

1. Russian River Pliny the Elder ✓
2. Bell’s Two Hearted Ale ✓
3. The Alchemist Heady Topper ✓
4. Ballast Point Sculpin IPA ✓
5. Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin IPA ✓
6. Founders Breakfast Stout ✘
7. Three Floyds Zombie Dust ✓
8. Bell’s Hopslam Ale ✓
9. Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout ✘
T10. Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA ✓
T10. Stone Enjoy By IPA ✓

Humans are generally blind to their own culture. But if you want a mirror in which to examine your own weird ways, Americans, I give you this list. It's true that homebrewers are just one group among beer fans, and if you polled the American public, you wouldn't come up with this list. But as beer fans go, homebrewers are a great subgroup. They're not just avid fans, they're avid fans who know a lot about different styles of beer. Polls many times reflect the ignorance of the respondents. Ask a thousand Americans about how to handle, say, the Yazidi crisis, and you'll come up with a majority who select one answer category. That doesn't mean more than four of them have ever heard of the Yazidis. Homebrewers are a reflection of the most knowledgeable group of beer drinkers in America. If you were looking for a new trend in brewing that might refute the dominance of IPAs, it would be among this group. Gose? Zero beers in the top 50. Saisons? One. Wild Ales? Two. Hoppy American ales? 37. (Big black ales are a majority of the non-IPAs.)

I noted this trend a couple years ago, and tracked down a list from the first poll Zymurgy ever did back in 2003. Only half the top ten were hoppy ales then, and just two of what we'd call IPA or IPA-adjacent beers today (Sierra Nevada Celebration and Stone Arrogant Bastard).

If you're looking at these lists and still can't understand what I'm talking about, imagine if this were a German homebrewing magazine. Would you expect to see 82% of the top beers represented by IPA? Of course you wouldn't. Once you chuck light lagers out of the equation, the passion among beer drinkers is starkly clear. For anyone who's spent time looking at the development of beer styles, this makes complete sense, too. In other beer-drinking countries, the national or regional palate narrows and gets more specific, whether it's světlý ležák or abbey ale or kölsch. When we look in the mirror of this poll, our developing culture is staring right back at us.

How American IPAs Evolved

Over at our local alt-weekly Willamette (rhymes with dammit) Week, arts and culture editor Martin Cizmar has an interesting article that got me thinking. In it he argues a point I've been making for years--IPAs are moving away from bitterness and toward flavor and aromas. Willamette Week often takes a provocative, bubble-piercing approach that is a nice antidote to a self-congratulatory city. But in this case, I think that urge led Martin down a blind alley.

When Portland beer geeks sampled the beers blind, it turned out they preferred brighter, juicier versions like those in the Northeast, which have only recently popped up in Portland. The five best IPAs in the city come from brand-new breweries, and most of those have been influenced by Heady Topper, Julius and Sculpin, beers that present hops as a reward rather than a challenge.

I think this is wrong in a couple small ways and one big way. The Northeast, like the rest of the country, is not a monolith. Martin seems to be talking about New England here, but New England was actually very late getting to the hops party.  Heady Topper is a fascinating beer, but its influence was basically nil in the pubs and breweries of New England, which have largely tended toward English-inflected, balanced, and notably malty beers. (Its influence among the uber-geeks of BeerAdvocate is another matter.) Martin proves this pretty ably because in the three examples of Northeast IPAs he offers, one is from San Diego. It's not an old trend there. Those small New England breweries didn't even drive a palate shift in Portland, Maine, so I have a hard time believing they drove one in Portland, Oregon.

Like hops into cooling wort, so are the IPAs of our lives.

And anyway, Portland has its own fairly long history of the kinds of IPAs Martin describes. It starts with a beer he actually did mention--Bridgeport IPA, which dates back 20 years and is a beta version prototype for these kinds of beers: mid-IBUs with tons and tons of flavor and aroma. That would seem a more influential beer in moving the Oregon palate than a beer you could only buy onsite in Vermont. 

The more important mistake is thinking in terms of imitative causality at all. (Though this is a nearly ubiquitous idea, and one to which I used to subscribe.) There has been a shift from very bitter IPAs to IPAs marked by flavor and aroma, but it has happened around the country as brewers each made natural discoveries on their own. It developed incrementally, inside hundreds of breweries across the country, as the national palate shifted toward not just IPAs, but IPAs that expressed as much of that heady flavor and aroma Americans hops are capable of. When you understand the mechanics of trying to produce these qualities, it makes sense that the discoveries would happen brewery by brewery, with hundreds of little "a-ha!'s" happening co-emergently around the country.

The first inkling I had of this was talking to Ben Edmunds more than a year ago, when he mentioned how much more IBUs were extracted in late-addition hops that we realized. Last summer, we sat down and talked about hoppy American ales for my homebrew book, and he blew my mind when he described discoveries the brewery made as it tried to drive ever more flavor and aroma into its beers.

I finished an article describing this process for All About Beer that will appear in the next issue--and I don't want to completely steal that piece's thunder. But it's worth hinting and the broad themes now, in perhaps a pump-priming fashion. In talking to breweries from Maine Beer Company, Ben, Harpoon, and Ardent Ales (Richmond, VA), I kept hearing the same story (I heard it again from Gigantic's Van Havig recently). There was definitely a big trend in super-bitter beers, but it wasn't the only trend. Breweries have for a long time been trying to create beers with more vivid flavors and aromas that de-emphasized the bitterness. The difference between 2006 and now? In 2016, they can actually do it. Here's the thumbnail version of how this all happened.

American Hops
It of course starts with these incredible American hops we have. Unlike European varieties, they're not subtle or nuanced. They are gale-force flavor-bombs--so much so that they were originally derided as unusable. It didn't take too long before Americans started to find their hop tooth, and by the 2000s we were getting more and more attached to these tropical, citrusy, piney, dank flavors. They were mostly pretty high in alpha acids, hops' bittering agent. That would prove to be an issue down the line.

Flavor
Dry-hopping is an old technique that has been used for decades (centuries?) in the UK and Germany to infuse hop aroma into beer. Americans learned it a long time ago, too, so American ales have often had wonderful aromatics. So bitterness is easy, and aroma is easy. The difficulty is flavor. Breweries have learned to push hop additions later and later in the boil, and many (most?) now do a post-kettle hop addition for their hoppy ales. That is, after the beer is taken off the flame, they add another dose of hops and let them steep in the slowly-cooling wort. This is often the largest dose of hops, and breweries sometimes structure their recipes by thinking of this addition first--not starting with the bittering addition, as has been usual for centuries. 

IBUs
The fascinating part happened next. Those post-kettle hops? For basically all of history, brewers assumed they contributed no appreciable bitterness to the beer. If you google around and look at hop utilization charts, you'll see that according to conventional wisdom, steeping hops in sub-boiling wort shouldn't give you IBUs, or not many. And because breweries hadn't ever used very many post-kettle hops, they didn't have any reason to dispute this idea.

So fast-forward to the US, as Americans were trying to make IPAs with tons of post-kettle, high-IBU hops. They would plug their hop schedules into their beer recipe software, dialing in the amount of IBUs they wanted. Instead, they found that they were getting way more IBUs than the software predicted they would. Ben Edmunds told me, “The thing it opened our eyes to was that from a balance point of view, we were way higher in BUs than we wanted.” Since he had to use the flavor addition (late in the boil or following it) to keep that electric hop flavor up, the only thing he could do is start reducing the bitter charge “ So we started peeling away, peeling away. And the beers all got better.” In many of those IPAs that Martin Cizmar (and I) love, the first-addition bitter charges are tiny.  Ben: “Frankly, it’s not a secret, but all the brewers who make these award-winning beers—everyone does it. Those sixty-minute hops are basically for kettle performance.”

This was a pattern that repeated itself in breweries across the country. Brewers weren't learning this because they tasted beer from other breweries, they were learning it in their own process. (In that forthcoming article, look for the stories from the brewers themselves.)

Upshot
It's still common to hear people talk about IPAs as having regional differences. I think that's not only wrong, but it distracts from a far more interesting phenomenon. Over the course of the past decade, because of the influences of an emerging national palate, American brewers were beginning to develop new techniques to adapt to the hops and an orientation toward flavor and aroma. It wasn't a clever brewer or three who, like a hoppy Johnny Appleseed, spread the gospel of this new brewing style. It was the endpoint of an emerging national approach to brewing, one replicated in brewery after brewery across the US.  So I agree with Martin's major point: we love American IPAs that have very intense flavors and aromas. But this an American, not regional, style.

Counterfactuals

A little Saturday morning chin-scratcher for you to mull. Stan links to an article about the famous "judgment of Paris" in the wine world and wonders:

What if Fritz Maytag had not bought Anchor Brewing in 1965?

What if the committee charged in 1906 with interpreting the meaning of the Pure Food and Drug Act had decided to implement some sort of legal differentiation between all malt and adjunct beer, or enacted a proposal that lager beer be required to lager at least three months? (Both were considered and rejected.)

What if the USDA had not released the Cascade hop variety in 1972?

In comments, I suggested that there is no analogue in the beer world. It's just impossible to imagine that beer would remain the one product immune to the post-industrial return to quality and diversity that came to all the other products on the grocery shelves.

But there's a side debate here--one Stan and I have been batting back and forth for years. When we look at the landscape of American brewing now, what we see is a fully-developed American idiom: hoppy ales made with neutral yeasts and base malts, accented (if at all) with just a bit of caramel malt. Whether the name on the package is IPA, double IPA, white IPA, Session IPA (etc), that national lineage is always evident. I have argued to Stan--who has steadfastly remained unconvinced--that there is basically one source for all that. So let me put it out to you, and you can line up in the Stan, Jeff, or alternative camp as befits your reading of history:

What if Ken Grossman had never made Sierra Nevada Pale? (And as a corollary: Sierra Nevada Celebration?)

Discuss.

Portland's Favorite IPA

The Oregon Hophouse has recently been running a little experiment.  They invited patrons to try a flight of twelve IPAs and vote on their favorites.  In a certain sense, the free market functions as a way of determining patrons' favorite beers, too.  But in that case, people may be influenced by price, ad campaigns, the image of a brewery, peer pressure, or proximity.  Here it was just twelve unmarked beers and the palates of the tasters.  The flight contained:

• Barley Brown’s Pallet Jack
• Boneyard RPM
• Breakside IPA
• Crux Outcast
• Double Mountain Hop Lava
• Fort George Vortex
• Gigantic IPA
• Goodlife Descender
• Hop Valley Alphadelic
• Laurelwood Workhorse
• Migration Luscious Lupulin
• Ninkasi Total Domination

Care to guess which one came out on top?  Before I tell you, last year the champeen was Boneyard--but the beers weren't served blind.  This year, 864 people cast a ballot and the results looked like this: 

Barley Brown Pallet Jack: 160 (18.5%)*
Breakside IPA:132 (15.2%)
Boneyard RPM: 123 (14.2%)

I'm interested in this experiment because I think it tracks the momentary preferences of Oregonians.  Boneyard has definitely been the most recent example of the Oregon palate, with its thick body and saturated late-addition flavors and aromas.  Pallet Jack is lighter and sharper and more dank--to me it seems a bit more Californian. (A characterization I suspect would make a good Baker Citian cringe.) Breakside is a more classic interpretation, with tons of citrus and a hint of pine.  So does this suggest a move away from the Boneyard mode to something a little more universal?  Probably that's going too far--Boneyard did hang in at a respectable third.  But still, it's at least suggestive.

Interesting side-note.  In an email, the Hophouse's Kirsten Seitz added this bit of detail: "Breakside was in fourth/fifth place until the third week, when both locations saw a drastic increase in votes for Breakside.  It even earned the most votes during a week at each location in total votes, but it still wasn't enough to surpass Pallet Jack's monthly totals.  It was incredibly interesting to witness the change, and the staff felt certain that it was a new batch of Breakside."  I offer that without a lot of commentary--though I'd love it if someone from Breakside would care to weigh in with theories.

________________
*Does this prove Pallet Jack is definitively Portland's fave IPA?  No.  It was not a scientific study and there are any number of variables that were not controlled for.  But it was a blind tasting, and so I'd be leery to dismiss it outright, either. 

A Hoppy Ale to Rule Them All

A couple-three weeks back, Zymurgy magazine released its annual poll of readers' favorite commercial beers.  Homebrewers do not in any way represent the average beer drinker, but they have been, since the 1970s, on the cutting edge of American brewing.  They were the first to use American hops, it was from their ranks that the first craft brewers emerged, and they have long been the leading practitioners of techniques now standard in professional brewing.  (I mentioned their latest innovation recently.) 

Where beer culture emerges, it does so buoyed by the enthusiasm of the most avid fans.  Look to their preferences if you want to see the state of the country.  The following list will therefore in no way surprise you.  It contains a surfeit of hoppy ales, a few dark ales, and a very thin smattering of outliers.  (Depending on how you classify things, 35 of the fifty listed beers were hoppy ales; another nine were dark ales.  Five were flavored, four were barrel-aged.  The first beer that is not either a hoppy or dark ale comes in at 25--Boulevard Tank 7.)  The top ten:

1. Russian River Pliny the Elder (hoppy ale)
2. Bell’s Two Hearted Ale (hoppy ale)
3. Ballast Point Sculpin IPA (hoppy ale)
4. Bell’s Hopslam (hoppy ale)
5. The Alchemist Heady Topper (hoppy ale)
6. Lagunitas Sucks (hoppy ale)
7. Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA (hoppy ale)
8. Stone Enjoy By IPA (hoppy ale)
9. Founders Breakfast Stout (dark ale) (flavored)
10. Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (dark ale) (barrel-aged)

I wondered how this stacked up to past years as a way to chart the changing preferences among the uber geeks.  Zymurgy has only been doing this for 11 years, unfortunately enough, yet even that span of time is instructive.  The American Homebrewers Association director, Gary Glass, sent me the 2003 list--actually a top-12.  Have a look:

1. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (hoppy ale)
2. Anchor Steam (steam beer)
3. Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale (hoppy ale)
4. Anchor Liberty Ale (hoppy ale)
5. Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale (hoppy ale)
6. Alaskan Smoked Porter (dark ale) (flavored)
7. Brewery Ommegang Abbey Ale (dubbel) (flavored)
8. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot (hoppy ale)
9T. Anchor Old Foghorn (hoppy ale)
9T. Great Lakes Edmond Fitzgerald Porter (dark ale)
9T. New Belgium Fat Tire (amber ale)
9T. Samuel Adams Boston Lager (Vienna lager)

Only half of those beers are hoppy ales.  It includes six different styles, including a lager and lager-like beer (there are no lagers on the current list of 50).  Vestiges of the early days of craft brewing--one is an amber ale and two are old-school barley wines--have now fallen out of favor (zippo of both on 2014's top-50 charts).  Eight--two-thirds--of those beers no longer make the homebrewers' top fifty (Anchor Steam, Anchor Liberty, Alaskan Smoked Porter, Ommegang Abbey, Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, Anchor Old Foghorn, New Belgium Fat Tire, and Boston Lager).

Eleven years doesn't seem like a long time in the scope of things, but we can see the distant past reflected in 2003's list.  It was still loaded with beers from the founders--half came from Anchor and Sierra Nevada, and throw in Sam Adams for good measure.  Even Fat Tire, which didn't go back to the beginning, represented one of the founding styles (amber ale).  What's really shocking is that there's only one IPA (though it's smuggled in under a different name).  You could slide Anchor Liberty uneasily into that camp, but it's no one's version of a modern IPA, no matter what the old-timers try to tell you.  Sierra Celebration, at 6.8% and 62 IBUs of c-hops, definitely is. It's America's first American IPA, and still loved by beer drinkers--it's number 15 on the 2014 list.

Pliny the Elder has won the reader poll six years running, which shows how hops came to dominate craft beer.  There's a way in which it seems like we've always loved hoppy beers, but the 2003 list is proof that hops are a fairly recent phenomenon.  What convinces me that this isn't another trend destined to be replaced is the overwhelming dominance that vein of styles has in the beer geek's imagination.  When you look at the 2003 list, you can see different camps represented.  There are the homebrewers who liked balanced session beers.  There are those who liked exotic flavored beers.  And there are those who liked hops.  When you look at the current list, you see homebrewers who like hops and stouts, full stop.  They're not evolving toward diversity--they're coming to agreement on what good beer is.  Just like the English, Irish, Belgian, German, and Czech drinkers have done. 

If I had to bet on what the list will look like in 11 more years, I'd put all my money on hops.  It has become our national tradition.

Is IPA the Most Popular Style?

Via the Beeronomist, an article from The Economist detailing the rising popularity of IPA.  And then comes this claim:

The beer that craft brewers like making the most is IPA. Artisan beermakers in America adopted old recipes from Britain for their IPAs but gradually began to adapt the brews to their own tastes. The heavy use of hops allows them to show off their skills in blending different flavours. Some parts of America, like Britain, have an excellent climate for growing top-quality hops. The bold flavours and high alcohol content create a beer that has a distinct style and bold taste, yet can come in many shades. The passion for hops in American craft beers has taken on the characteristics of an arms race, as brewers try to outdo each other in hoppiness. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains-6?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ee/howindiapalealeconqueredworld#sthash.8dzgWZVS.dpuf

The beer that craft brewers like making the most is IPA. Artisan beermakers in America adopted old recipes from Britain for their IPAs but gradually began to adapt the brews to their own tastes. The heavy use of hops allows them to show off their skills in blending different flavours. Some parts of America, like Britain, have an excellent climate for growing top-quality hops. The bold flavours and high alcohol content create a beer that has a distinct style and bold taste, yet can come in many shades. The passion for hops in American craft beers has taken on the characteristics of an arms race, as brewers try to outdo each other in hoppiness. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains-6?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ee/howindiapalealeconqueredworld#sthash.8dzgWZVS.dpuf

The beer that craft brewers like making the most is IPA. Artisan beermakers in America adopted old recipes from Britain for their IPAs but gradually began to adapt the brews to their own tastes. The heavy use of hops allows them to show off their skills in blending different flavours. Some parts of America, like Britain, have an excellent climate for growing top-quality hops. The bold flavours and high alcohol content create a beer that has a distinct style and bold taste, yet can come in many shades. The passion for hops in American craft beers has taken on the characteristics of an arms race, as brewers try to outdo each other in hoppiness.

It's a careful and accurate article (no mention of Hodgson!), and even the claim about IPA's popularity is situated with the brewer, not the consumer.  So no big quibbles.  But the real if unspoken point is that IPAs are the most popular style in American craft brewing, one I think most even casual Oregonians would endorse.  And I do, too!  I'd go further and say that the modern IPA is the ur-American beer, with all the hallmarks of the American tradition (hops, caramel malt, octane). 

But is it the most popular?  Even in our massively data-driven world, we lack the numbers to tell.  On the west coast, IPAs surely outnumber other styles, and many are best-sellers.  But people drink a lot of light wheaty ales, too.  More pointedly, the West Coast is not America and the drinkers who haunt Saraveza are not representative of all craft beer drinkers.  It seems improbable that IPA won't become America's favorite craft beer (and quite possibly its favorite beer), but I do wonder if we're there yet. 

Something to consider as I sit in the shade today, possibly with a hoppy American ale.

The beer that craft brewers like making the most is IPA. Artisan beermakers in America adopted old recipes from Britain for their IPAs but gradually began to adapt the brews to their own tastes. The heavy use of hops allows them to show off their skills in blending different flavours. Some parts of America, like Britain, have an excellent climate for growing top-quality hops. The bold flavours and high alcohol content create a beer that has a distinct style and bold taste, yet can come in many shades. The passion for hops in American craft beers has taken on the characteristics of an arms race, as brewers try to outdo each other in hoppiness. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains-6?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ee/howindiapalealeconqueredworld#sthash.8dzgWZVS.dpuf

Well, That's Settled: The Best IPAs

A few weeks back, Thrillist's Dan Gentile contacted me to help him assemble a best-IPAs list.  It's out now with the hopeful title "The Definitive Top Ten IPAs."  My guess is that "definitive" is going to be a hard sell--but this is actually an interesting list.  Gentile asked us all to submit our own top tens and then he assigned point values to each of our beers (ten for number 1, nine for number two and so on).  There were nine of us, meaning we each had 55 points to distribute, and any one beer might have scored as highly as 90 points.  There was a mathematical elegance to the results.  We collectively came up with 45 beers (out of a possible 90) and the winner also scored 45 of the possible ninety.

Click to enlarge.

If you selected any nine beer geeks at random, you would come up with a different list.  Or nine different brewers or nine different cicerones or nine different writers.  There are seven million IPAs out there, and we have very particular individual tastes.  Leave the list aside, though, and look more closely at the results--therein lie the lessons.  Four of the nine of us fingered Russian River Blind Pig as the best beer.  Bear Republic's Racer 5, meanwhile, didn't make anyone's top three list, but picked up enough points to come in sixth.  We may have differed over our favorite IPA, but when it came to filling out the ballot, Racer 5 was a gimme.

Eight of the top ten beers were brewed in California.  That's staggering dominance of the category, and I think it's a pretty accurate reflection of the state of things nationwide.  When I was making up my own list (see the end of this post), I didn't include anything west of Hood River.  On Facebook, some folks lobbied to have Bell's there.  But while Bell's is a classic beer and a fine IPA, I could easily find twenty other IPAs I like more.  Ten years ago we might have debated about who makes the best IPAs, but that argument was long ago settled.  Everyone looks to the west now (including Europeans).  If you look at the bottom of the list, there are also some surprises.  Stone IPA got but two points--either a ninth place showing from one voter or two tenth-place votes.  And New Belgium Ranger was dead last with a single point.

Notes on My List
I knew when I turned in my list that numbers two and three were long-shots to make the final list.  Double Mountain Vaporizer had a chance, but it was slim.  Lambrate Gaina had no chance at all--and probably no one who reads that article will ever have even heard of it.  Which is, of course, why I threw it on the list.  There are great IPAs made outside the US--but more than being great, they're different.

Lambrate is this wonderful little brewpub in Milan.  Founded by friends who have a buoyant attitude about brewing, they make Italian beers that reflect their personalities.  Italy does not do intense.  Hoppy beers are subtle and layered; sour beers are tart and toothsome, not lacerating.  In the case of Gaina, the hops were so fruity I literally asked what kind of fruit they had used to make it.  The flavors fell somewhere between apricot and strawberry.  No fruit--all hops.  Later I found another hop fan in Bruno Carilli when I visited Toccalmatto in Fidenza, Parma.  He also coaxed amazing flavors from his beers--but more perfumy and exotic, with lemon-mint and bergamot. 

Oh, and I would have included any IPA from genre had I put this list together--and my original number 1 was Russian River Pliny the Elder, the best hoppy beer in the world.  So I subbed in Blind Pig as a nod to Pliny's brewer.  (Plus, Blind Pig is excellent.)

Here's my list.
1. Russian River Pliny the Elder Blind Pig (California)
2. Lambrate Gaina (Italy)
3.  Double Mountain Vaporizer (Oregon)
4. Bear Republic Racer 5 (California)
5.  Van Eecke Poperings Hommelbier (Belgium)
6.  Thornbridge Jaipur IPA (England)
7.  Gigantic IPA (Oregon)
8. Green Flash Le Freak (California)
9.  Toccalmatto Re Hop (Italy)
10.  Deschutes Chainbreaker (Oregon)

A Better History of American IPA

Source: Ron Pattinson

It was never preordained for the United States to develop an industry of 2500 independent breweries by 2013.  It took the extraordinary work of a vanguard of pioneers to till the soil and make ready the flowering to come. Among that handful of important figures, few stand taller than Charlie Papazian, and we rightly hold him in high esteem.  But he isn't a great historian of brewing, and his current blog post about IPAs gets a ton of stuff wrong.  It's a problem precisely because he's held in such high regard by so many people.  I don't want to do a point-by-point dissection of the post (though use the opportunity to read Martyn Cornell's multi-post exegeses on IPAs if you're feeling hazy on the history). 

Instead, I'd rather tackle the heart of Charlie's argument and make an important global point about brewing history and America's role in it.  

The second reason why hoppy beers have become popular in the USA is that successful American craft brewers have learned how to use new, modern and innovative techniques to extract the complex characters of American hops...  Not until the last decade of the 20th century did American craft brewers really perfect their methods to infuse maximum and varied hop character into their beer.

This is just wrong.  Beer has brewed on this planet since before civilization (making dating its origins tricky), but probably in the neighborhood of eight thousand years.  In that long time, brewers have made exactly three watershed discoveries.  Just three!

1. They learned to malt grain.  Again, we're pre-history here, so it's all murky, but archaeologists have found evidence of a proto-beer made from unmalted barley and wheat.  (They call it "gruel beer.")  It was very weak because humans hadn't yet figured out how to unlock the sugary potential of the grain kernel.  By the time the Sumerians and Egyptians were writing about beer, they had.
2. They figured out how to use hops.  For seven thousand years, brewers tried to balance the sweetness of fermented grain with myriad spices.  Eventually someone--probably a monk--figured out that if you boil wort with hops in it, the resultant beer will last a great deal longer.   Because hops are very strongly flavored, it took centuries for the innovation to become a standard practice.
3. They figured out the microbiology of yeast.  Brewers knew about yeast, but they didn't know what it was or exactly how it worked.  Pasteur taught them that it was a biological process and within a few decades, they had learned how to control souring microorganisms in a way that had eluded brewers for 7,850 years.  Some ignored the information; most did not.

That's it.  One of the things you realize if you pore through the records of old beer is that nothing is new.  If you've been brewing for a few years and an idea occurred to you while you were showering one morning, go ahead and assume that it had passed the brain of another brewer in the centuries before you picked up the mashing fork.  Not only are we not brewing unusual beers now, we're brewing stuff that looks incredibly tame by the standards of the old brewer.  Those guys brewed weird.  They made titanic beers; they made tiny beers.  They made beers with tons of hops--and beers with very few.  They made light beers, dark beers, wheat beers, sour beers, beers with beans and eggs, beers with chimney soot.  They boiled some of their beers for 18 hours and others they didn't boil at all. 

The United States, if we keep our eye on the ball for the next century, may well become an important brewing country.  If we manage the trick, it won't be because we've done something new, it will be because we've done something well enough that it has developed its own contours and lines.  It will have become distinct and identifiable.  People will taste a beer and, as when they sample a cask bitter, helles lager, or abbey ale, know the country from which it came. 

IPAs look to be a good candidate for part of that development.  They have particular characteristics (though ones that are in a state of flux) that make them a cohesive group.  They have begun to capture the attention of the population.  But let's not kid ourselves: strong, hoppy ales are hardly new.  It wasn't our cleverness or modern techniques that made them take off.  We have great hops here, vivid and varied, but great hops have been in use, in different countries, for nearly a thousand years.  It takes an equal measure of hubris and historical ignorance to think we've invented something new.  (Sort of like how Europeans "discovered" America.)  We have found a style that harnesses local ingredients and expresses our flavor preferences, and we've stuck with the style for about a decade.  All good.  But we have more work to do.

Be leery of claims about America's import in the brewing world.  Few endeavors have a longer history or have been practiced by more people over the millennia.  It is an exciting time to live, and thanks to technological advances and a shrinking world, more styles of beer are available to Americans than have ever been available to one nation before.  But we didn't invent those styles or the methods of brewing them and, even when we can maybe fool ourselves into thinking an idea is new, it's best to start with the assumption it's not.