Beer Basics #2: IPA

IPAs have dominated American craft brewing for roughly the past 15 years. IPA, in all of its iterations, connotes a beer with a strong emphasis on hop aroma. This means that IPAs are more aggressively dry-hopped than all other beer styles and that the brewing industry is always innovating new ingredients and techniques to pack more hop aroma into these beers. “Dry-hopping” refers to the process of steeping hops in fermenting or fully—fermented beer to provide a more intense hop aroma.

Hazy vs West Coast
While there are numerous variations under the IPA umbrella, the two categories of IPA that will be most important to your customers are “West Coast IPAs” and “Hazy IPAs.” The West Coast IPA is the older of these styles, originating in the 1980s and taking over in the 1990s. The trailblazing brewers of this style were based in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Conversely “Hazy IPAs” have their origin in the 2000s at smaller breweries in the Northeast. West Coast IPAs favor higher clarity, neutral fermentation characteristics, and aromas that tend to stay tied to the natural world. Hazy IPAs tend to employ wheat or oats for a softer mouthfeel and more opaque appearance and utilize much more expressive yeast strains, typically of English origin. Combine that with newer experimental hop varieties and we end up with a Hazy IPA aroma that can tend toward synthetic confections as opposed to fruits or plants — (for example, where hazy IPA might smell of orange soda or even an orange creamsicle, a West Coast IPA is more apt to offer the aroma an actual orange).