CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF HOPS
STORY BY CHRIS KELLER
The first time I ever tried a hazy IPA, I thought it was a mistake. It was Heady Topper, a double IPA from Vermont brewery The Alchemist. It is widely considered to be the first hazy IPA so how momentous that it would be my first one! A customer who’ d just come in from Vermont, brought it in as a gift, showing me that it was the number one ranked beer on“ Beer Advocate.”
The can was silver with an black illustration of a bearded man drinking a beer with a cloud of hops bursting out of the top of his head. The rim of the can had the instructions“ Drink from the can!” I did not follow those instructions and poured it into a glass. It poured out thick, cloudy and orange with a fluffy white head. The hop aroma was instantly apparent and super juicy, but so cloudy! It had to be an error in packaging, I thought. I’ d seen it happen before with unfiltered beer. Excess yeast, hop matter, or protein solids settle in the bottom of the tank during conditioning. Usually these solids are dropped out before packaging, but mistakes do happen and I was certain that this had to be one of those occasions. The customer who’ d given it to me assured me that it’ s supposed to look like that. A quick Google search then confirmed that that’ s how this beer has always looked. Well, I’ ll be! It certainly tasted amazing but coming from a brewery that valued clarity in our IPAs, it made me wonder what these guys in Vermont were up to! At the time I thought it was a one off, then I thought it was a fad. It wasn’ t long, though,
before I started seeing more and more of these hazy jewels coming through our front doors and poured into pint glasses at the bar.
The hazy IPA, also known as New England IPA, or NEIPA for short, is a beer style that focuses on hop aroma and flavor over hop bitterness. Bitterness from hops, measured in“ International Bittering Units” or IBUs, comes from boiling the hops in the brew kettle. The longer hops are boiled, the higher the IBUs but less hop flavor. Less boil time results in more hop flavor and lower IBUs. Hops with no boil time produce hop aroma and no IBUs. This is why beer recipes have a hop addition schedule. A typical West Coast IPA is boiled for 60 to 90 minutes and will have hop additions throughout the boil. The first hop addition boils for 60 minutes, the next for 30, then 15 or 10, and maybe a 5 minute or a 0 minute right at the end. More hops are added to the fermenter at the end of fermentation. This produces a very balanced hop profile with lots of bitterness, hop flavor, and hop aroma. Hazy IPAs focus on heavy hop flavor and aroma additions and very little to no bittering additions. It does take a lot more hops to get that flavor. Even though a hazy IPA tends to be less bitter, a typical hazy IPA uses one and a half to two times the amount of hops in a West Coast. Hops aren’ t cheap and because of all these extra hops, hazy IPAs tend to cost at least 60 % more.
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