Tag Archives: ipa

The Myth of the Authentic IPA

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From an advertisement for Whitbread IPA, 1935.

From an advertisement for Whitbread IPA, 1935.PA

Modern beer historians have done some wonderful work challenging myths about India Pale Ale. The one we’re interested right now is this, as expressed by Martyn Cornell in a post which then demolishes it:

North American craft brewers more closely adhere to early IPA specifications than do British brewers who, as a group, do not.

How did that belief arise? What was going on in the world of beer to convince everyone (including us) that, if a beer wasn’t strong and aromatic, it wasn’t a ‘real’ IPA? Here are four possible contributions to the development of that myth.

1. The Durden Park Beer Circle published, Old British Beers and How to Make Them, an influential collection of historic recipes, in 1976. We haven’t got our hands on an original edition but our 2003 reprint contains this on Hodgson’s India Pale Ale

…had an OG over 70, a hop rate of 2.5 oz per gallon… [and was] carefully primed and dry hopped before despatch to India. Fully matured by the tropical heat, India ale had a hop nose, full flavour and the luscious taste that only comes with an initially over-hopped ale that has fully matured.

2. Anchor Liberty, first brewed in 1975 using tons of the then new Cascade hop, was ‘inspired’ by the British practice of dry hopping, and its strength was similar to that of early nineteenth-century British IPAs. The brewery was old; their Steam Beer was a survivor of an earlier age; the beer had a faux-vintage label; and was brewed to commemorate American independence. All of that, perhaps, added up to a sense of historical authenticity it didn’t exactly deserve.

3. Though he barely mentioned IPA in his 1977 World Guide to Beer, Michael ‘Beer Hunter’ Jackson’s 1982 Pocket Guide (the one most people we’ve spoken to actually owned, because it was smaller and cheaper) describes the intensely bitter, hop-aromatic Ballantine’s IPA as a survivor of an earlier age of American brewing, descended from nineteenth-century British beers. It’s easy to see how this might have developed into the myth of the ‘more authentic American IPA’.

4. In 1993, at the request of Mark Dorber of the White Horse in West London, Bass brewed an IPA to a historic recipe. It was c.6.5% ABV with 84 units of bitterness, according to a contemporary Guardian article by Roger Protz (4/9/1993): ‘it’s like putting your head inside a sack of hops fresh from Kent. The aroma is pungent, spicy, peppery and resiny, and the hops dominate the palate and the finish as well.’

5. The excitement around the recreated Bass IPA, and the White Horse festival it was brewed for, triggered a brief historical IPA mania. Robin Young of The Times described IPAs brewed to nineteenth-century recipes as ‘the special fad’ of the 1994 Great British Beer Festival; and the 1995 Good Beer Guide reports on the preceding year’s ‘IPA fever’. The emphasis in most reports was on the authenticity and hop ‘oomph’ of these brews compared to supposedly ‘bowdlerized’ modern IPAs.

Anyone else have any suggestions? Is there a c.1980 US home brewing text, perhaps, that makes the claim?

When Big IPAs Were Rare

Anchor Liberty Ale IPA

Do you remember how we were back in ’05? (A waltz begins to play, distantly.) We were so young and carefree, and the Cask vs. Keg storm brewing on the horizon didn’t worry us. We thought we were invincible!

As Alan has pointed out (prompting a mild case of anxiety on our part), writing about very recent history is a risky business. Yesterday, we found ourselves struggling to recall what the UK beer scene was actually like in 2005-06, with some objectivity.

It’s feels like yesterday but, the more we read, the more it’s apparent how things have changed. It was hard, for example, to find full-bodied, heavily-hopped American-style IPAs in supposedly cosmopolitan London. They existed, but they took some hunting down, and a large part of their value was their rarity.

Meantime’s big IPA was one of the few British examples we were able to get our hands on with any ease, and it seemed a very big, boozy beer. It’s certainly no wonder Thornbridge Jaipur was greeted with such raptures in 2005.

Nowadays, any brewery aiming at the ‘craft’ segment of the market will have an IPA as a core beer in its range, rather than a limited edition ‘specialty’. They’ll probably also make a double IPA, a black IPA, twenty-four single-hopped IPAs, and one which has been cross-bred with a saison.

Those beers we thought were massively hopped, strong, and mind-blowingly intense have been devalued through inflation.

We aren’t the first to ask: are IPAs the new ‘boring brown bitter’?

What’s going to be really odd is 2007 onwards: like Marty McFly or Doctor Who, we’ll be going back through our own blogging timeline hunting for evidence.

Alternate History: XXXX instead of IPA

Imaginary keg font with 1977 Food Standards labelling recommendations.

The UK Government’s 1977 Food Standards Committee Report on Beer is a strange but illuminating document. It records how certain words and phrases relating to beer were being used at a certain point in time and, in its recommendations, most of which were ignored, presents a vision of what might have been.

After representations from CAMRA and others, the Committee agreed that beer needed clearer labelling. Their proposals were that draught beer point-of-sale information (pumpclips) ought to contain:

  • A declaration of the amount of the amount of malted barley used.
  • An indicator of strength based on the ‘XXX’ system, referring to original gravity rather than alcohol percentage in the finished product.
  • Disclosure of carbonation above 1.5 volumes.

Their proposal for the gravity bands and acceptable (but not compulsory) text descriptions was as follows.

  • Up to but not including 1035 — Light — X
  • 1035 up to but not including 1041 — Special, Heavy — XX
  • 1041 up to but not including 1047 — Export, India Pale Ale (IPA) — XXX
  • 1047 up to but not including 1062 — Strong — XXXX
  • 1062 and above — Extra Strong, Barley Wine — XXXXX

In the explanatory notes, they say this of IPA:

“India Pale Ale” (“IPA”) was originally brewed to have sufficient stability for export by sea to India and “export” probably came into use as a modern equivalent. These beers were originally stronger than those brewed for the home market and our impression is that consumers expect them to be rather stronger than ordinary beers. We recommend that the use of these two descriptions should be restricted to beers in the third band (XXX). We realise that there will be some beers which have been called “export” which are stronger than is given by this band. Any limitation of names must create anomalies, which are the more to be regretted if the claim to the name has a reasonable basis in terms of the original meaning of export.

They also suggest banning the use of the words ‘best’ and ‘premium’ on beer packaging. If they’d reported this year, they’d probably have added to that list ‘craft’, ‘crafted’, and so on.

On that basis, a pumpclip for a keg IPA with an original gravity of more than 1047 (that is, stronger than about 4.5% ABV) might have looked something like the one we’ve mocked up in the picture above. Weird, huh?

South West, not Wild West

St Austell Big Job IPA.

Proper Job IPA (cask at 4.5%; bottled at 5.5%) is the hoppiest of St Austell’s regular range, and its internationally successful brand has been ‘extended’ to give us Proper Black (a bottled black IPA at 6%) and now Big Job, a bottled US-inspired strong IPA at 9%.

Roger Ryman, head brewer at St Austell, has used the name Big Job for various strong IPAs in recent years, including a ‘south seas’ version, and the c.6% cask beer we tried at Bodmin beer festival earlier this year. This iteration, presented in a crown-capped 750ml bottle, is an unashamed imitation of of the type of American ‘double IPA’ you might see lurking in a fridge at the Craft Beer Company.

On the whole, we felt distinctly warm towards this beer. It has Ryman’s trademark clean, distinct, bright flavours, and would certainly pass as something from across the Atlantic in a blind tasting. Its tagline is ‘massively hopped’ and, from the undoubtedly generous use of Citra and Centennial hops, we got sweet orange fruit rather than puckering grapefruit, with perhaps a little whiff of music-festival drug fug. Massive? No, but plenty, in terms of flavour, at least. It also has some just-caught sugar bitterness, sweet marmalade stickiness and a throat-catching alcoholic burn (nicer than it sounds) for balance.

There is no downside, as such — there’s nothing bad about it — but, compared to the Brewdog Punk IPA we drank afterwards, Big Job seemed a little restrained in its aroma (as if it really had travelled a few thousand miles, in fact), so perhaps a heavier hand with the dry-hopping might help it along. We also thought, at this strength and sweetness, that it could have stood a little more carbonation. It would certainly bear up well if kegged, in the coldest, fizziest way imaginable.

We might well pick up a bottle if we find ourselves near the brewery shop (depending on the price) and, in the unlikely event we ever see it in a pub, will certainly get one to share. It’s the kind of beer we’d like to see more of in Cornwall, alongside the ‘everyday drinkers’.

In fact, on that point, it’s surely about time St Austell got themselves a flagship pub or bar which is all about the beer — somewhere we could go every weekend and find the latest experiment from the pilot plant, rather than schlepping about on public transport trying to hunt them down.

We didn’t schlep anywhere to find this: it was sent to us gratis, without charge, absolutely free, and at no cost to us, by St Austell.

What Does IPA Mean?

In his latest post, Ron Pattinson rails against those who deride Greene King IPA as “not a proper India Pale Ale” while they blindly accept Guinness’s right to call itself a stout. IPA, Ron points out, was not always strong, even in the nineteenth century; and, anyway, British beer styles evolve over time: an 1850 IPA would bear little resemblance to one brewed in, say, 1946.

The fact is, though, that GK do seem out of step with the current usage of the term IPA.

On the one hand, more traditional ale brewers in the UK tend to give the name to the beer in their range which, compared to their standard bitter, is lighter in colour (often orange-hued) and more evidently hoppy.

On the other, “new wave” British brewers tend to make IPAs in the US manner — strong, deep amber, and with heavy, piney, citrusy hopping.

Not many breweries (in fact, only GK?) produce an “IPA” which is deep brown and lightly-hopped.

So, although of course GK aren’t doing anything wrong, it’s easy to see why some people might be puzzled or disappointed if they’re used to other breweries’ IPAs. (Although feeling almost physically angry is a little over-zealous.)

Of course, for all that, there are lots of people who like GK IPA and couldn’t give a flying one whether it’s a “proper IPA” by either historical or beer geek standards. In fact, the only IPA they know is GK’s so perhaps, in twenty years time, IPA will come to mean brown, lightly hopped beer, just as Guinness now defines stout for most drinkers.

 

Memorable Beers #1: Goose Island IPA

We first tried Goose Island IPA in the Rake, probably around Christmas of 2006.

We never spend Christmas together but have always compensated with a sort of ‘office Christmas do’ a week or so before. When we lived in London, that usually meant taking a day off work, Christmas shopping for as long as we could bear it, and then chasing beer from midday onwards.

Borough Market is like the set of a Dickens adaptation at Christmas: roasting chestnuts, carols and mulled wine on the air. Expensive apples.

Were we just in a ‘peace on Earth and goodwill to all beers’ kind of mood, or was drinking that IPA really like tasting in Technicolor? We said wow a lot and marvelled at its slight haze. We may even have giggled with excitement. We declared it our favourite beer for some time thereafter.

These days, though we still enjoy it, we find GI IPA muted and too full of crystal malt — not Seville orange marmalade so much as seaside fudge.

If we write another fifty or so posts in the next twenty-five days, we’ll hit 1000 by the time we hit our fifth anniversary of blogging; as that date approaches, we are also feeling nostalgic. Hence this series. Yeah, we like round numbers — sue us.

Second honeymoon

A page from Michael Jackson's 500 beers book.

IPA was one of our first loves. As many people just getting into beer seem to find, the bold, obvious hop flavour and aroma provided an entrance point and, in the most visceral way, excited us. In the Great Beer Guide by Michael Jackson (our Bible back then) it was always the IPAs which looked most alluring — pictured in stemmed glasses, pale at the bottom, glowing amber at the top, the aroma almost lifting off the page. The fact that they played hard to get didn’t hurt, either: finding a strong hoppy IPA in London in 2007 involved research and usually one or more changes of public transport.

In the last year or two, however, we’ve drifted away from this style, partly because (at its worst) IPA can be a one-trick pony, and partly because the novelty wore off. (Colin Valentine was right — once they were everywhere, we got bored and moved on.)

This Christmas, however, we had the opportunity to stop thinking too hard and just enjoy several now easy-to-find IPAs.

St Austell Proper Job (5.5%, bottle)

Back in November, visiting Bridgwater, we were tipped off that Mole Valley Farmers were selling off out-of-date stock of Proper Job and Admiral’s Ale. We bought everything they had at 60p a bottle, knowing that, being bottle-conditioned, it was unlikely to have ‘gone off’. Sure enough, what we actually got in the Proper Job was a beautifully mellowed, rounded, aged IPA, without the slightly astringent hoppiness and thinnish body of the fresh cask version. Always a great beer, but one that doesn’t mind a bit of time to mature, it turns out.

Fuller’s Bengal Lancer (5.3%, bottle)

Is this getting better? The early batches were delicious but, here and there, had a hint of stewed tea about them. The bottles we drank over Christmas not only resembled cask ale more closely than any other bottled beer we’ve tried (skillful use of the microscope?) but also seemed brighter, cleaner and somehow less… English. Worth having in by the case, if you’re that way inclined.

Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference IPA (Marston’s) (5.9%, bottle)

This was the real surprise. We picked it up as an emergency backup — you don’t want to run out of beer on boxing day, do you? — but had a moment of eye-popping joy on tasting it. It reminded us, for some reason we can’t quite pin down, of those heady first days of exploring beer with a Michael Jackson book in our rucksack and absolutely no idea what we were talking about. (Reader: Nothing’s changed, then?) Could it be the upfront cascade hops, once the darlings of the brewing scene, now a bit old hat? At any rate, Marston’s are now somewhat redeemed in our eyes. Worst tasting notes ever, though: malt and hops, apparently.

Thornbridge Jaipur (5.9%, cask)

We approached this with some trepidation. Tandleman and others whose tastebuds we have no reason to doubt have not been impressed with it lately. Fortunately, on this occasion, we found it as as glorious as ever. Compared to the three bottled IPAs, it seemed to have more toffee and certainly had a weightier body. A deep beer, yes, but also a very drinkable one, which slipped down and caused us (literally) to smack our lips.

Maybe, as we approach our fifth year of blogging about beer, it’s time to return to dig out Michael Jackson and get back to where we once belonged?

A quick one: Acorn Green Bullet IPA

The latest in Acorn’s fascinating series of beers showcasing New Zealand hops uses Green Bullet, a variety I’ve never heard of before. Green by name and green by nature — this tasted raw, grassy and herbal. I thought it was just the right side of astringent, but still probably a bit more bitter than I’d like. It slipped down very nicely, nonetheless.

Boak

Motueka IPA

We’re big fans of experimental beers made with a single variety of hop and (so far) have yet to have a bad beer from Barnsley’s Acorn Brewery, so we just had to try Motueka IPA at the Pembury Tavern.

The beer was fantastic — quenching, herbal and dry, with perhaps just a hint of banana in the aroma — but, on this showing, we’d be hard pressed to identify Motueka hops if we came across them again without a bloody great big sign telling us they were there. We tend to hop from beer to beer if there are several on offer but went back for more of this, Tandleman-style, which must say something.

For more single hop action check out Geoff’s fascinating homebrewing experiments.

Update 17/03/10 — of course we meant “a single variety of hop” rather than “a single hop”. How crap would that beer be?

Cornwall and beer on the train

mandscornishipa

We’ve just returned from a week in Cornwall, in the far south west of England, so expect a few posts in the coming days on our beery adventures around St Ives.

We got the week off to a good start on the train from London last Saturday with a few bottles of Marks and Spencer’s relatively new Cornish IPA.

We were pleased to see that the supermarket chain are now crediting the brewers of their own-brand bottle-conditioned beers on the labels (we  beer geeks like to know where our booze is coming from) and that this is a product of St Austell.

We guessed it would be a rebadge of their brilliant bottle conditioned Proper Job, but it’s not. It’s weaker (5% as opposed to 5.6%) and also has a lighter body and drier finish. It’s much closer, in fact, to cask conditioned Proper Job. We thought it was delicious. One of the best bottled beers we’ve had in a long while.

Thanks, St Austell and M&S, for a great start to our break.