Craft brewers have broken the IPA

INDIA PALE ALES DOMINATE TODAY'S CRAFT beer landscape, with 10 or so styles laying claim to the name. Now there's one more: the 'clear hazy' IPA. San Diego's Ballast Point Brewing Co pioneered the category, which upset plenty of beer nerds and confused others, with the February 2021 release of Big Gus.

- MANDY NAGLICH

'IPA is a familiar acronym to beer drinkers, regardless if you're a novice or a total nerd,' says Dan Lamonaca, owner of Beer Karma Bottle Shop in Brooklyn, New York. That's why so many brewers (and their marketing departments) label beers with these three letters, even if they don't really fit the IPA mould. For example, Lamonaca says people who come in looking for sour IPAs are 'not really looking for something that mirrors an IPA but definitely want something with bold flavours.'

Flavour, not appearance, is also at the heart of the somewhat absurd clear hazy term. The signature attributes of tongue-numbing bitterness and intense resinous hop aroma in clear IPAs give them a reputation of being hoppier than their hazy IPA counterparts that display less aggressive hop characteristics like soft mouthfeel and rounded tropical hop aromas. In truth, clear IPAs and hazy IPAs use about the same amount of hops per barrel. It's not how many hops are used in brewing, but when in the process they are added, that determines the flavour and category of the final beer.

'With historical English IPA, hops were added during the boil, and then the wort was run over more hops in hop back,' says Mitch Steele, author of IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes, and the Evolution of the India Pale Ale and brewmaster and co-founder at Georgia's New Realm Brewing. The boil addition extracted maximum bitterness from hops, as alpha acids become bitter iso-alpha acids at temperatures over 82.2°C. Meanwhile, the cooler, post-boil hop back preserves aromatic essential oils and converts fewer alpha acids into bitter compounds.