How East Meets West
As a follow-up to yesterday’s surprisingly uncontroversial post about the timing of IPA development on both coasts, it’s worth laying out a fuller timeline and incorporating the way the coasts figure into the history. One could write a book on this and document it carefully—and I’d welcome that!—but I don’t have the time to do that now. I’m a bit of a completeist and comments by Lars Marius Garshol and Mark on that post do seem provocative enough to follow up briefly.
Let’s set it up with the comments. Here’s Lars first:
Aren't there two separate events here? The first being the introduction of hoppy beers. That is, modern, hop-forward IPAs and double IPAs. I think everyone agrees this happened on the west coast in the 80s, picking up speed in the 90s. The second is harder to pinpoint, but there was a movement that gave birth to the hazy/juicy IPAs that most people call NEIPA. A shift from bitterness+aromatics to a more pure focus on aromatics.
Next, Mark:
There's the use of English strains of yeast that accentuate the "juicy" flavors/aromas. Noonan is famous for bringing Conan to the forefront in the 90s, which is what Kimmich borrowed when he started the Alchemist. This is, to my mind, the key indicator of NEIPA. There's also a lowered bitterness (pretty distinct from typical West Coast IPA race for bitterness), though this is less distinct. I mean, Heady Topper is pretty bitter compared to, say, most Tired Hands. Other adjuncts (oats, wheat, rye, lactose, etc...) are common but not really as defining as the yeast.
Here’s how I’d characterize these differences. The East and West Coasts had different cultures until the mid- to late-aughts. The West Coast was always more ales-focused and more hops-focused. Sierra Nevada struck the tuning fork for the chime of hops, and breweries up and down the coast followed that clarion note. The beguiling snap of citrus became a defining character whether a brewery was making a wheat ale (Widmer Brothers) an amber (Full Sail) or a pale (everyone). Very hoppy beers were being made in small batches by the end of the 1980s and were starting to become popular by the mid 1990s.
In New England, British-style ales, with a focus on maltiness, was much more common. Sweetness, rather than bitterness, was a signature of these beers. There was even the famous trend of making beers with heavy doses of diacetyl. Harpoon introduced their “IPA” as early as 1993, but it was essentially a West Coast-style pale ale—soft and gentle. New England also had a more divergent scene, thanks to breweries like Allagash and Sam Adams. The important difference, though, was that hops weren’t a big deal then.
I think it’s actually a bit of a distraction to get into the intervening years, because what happened in the mid-aughts was an American trend not isolated to either coast. That’s when the new generation of hops started to emerge (Amarillo in 2003, Citra in 2007). These offered a wider fruit array than the citrus-to-pine character of the C hops, and beguiled brewers who were trying to pull more of the flavor and aroma from them. This was a challenge, because they were, by historical standards, extremely high in alpha acids. To manage this, brewers started pushing more and more of them later and later in the boil. This both helped reduce the bitterness and increase the flavors and aromas the new hops presented.
The big difference was that on the West Coast, there was already a longstanding IPA tradition by that time. It featured sharp bitterness—though perhaps more is made of this element than was actually present. Extremely bitter beers touting absurd IBUs were brewed, but the typical IPAs, particularly in the Northwest, had a softer, rounder presentation and were less aggressive. So as West Coast brewers began to embrace the trend of very aromatic, flavorful fruit flavors, they did so in the context of this older tradition. Their beers were juicy and somewhat bitter—though the move away from bitterness happened here as well. See Deschutes’ “sweet IPA,” Fresh Squeezed.
In New England, the trend was heavily influenced by Heady Topper, a beer murky enough that the brewery encouraged drinkers not to decant from the can. As other breweries began to make IPAs in the late aughts, that connection between very cloudy, opaque beers and hop juiciness became fixed in customers’ minds. Breweries accentuated it by using wheat and oats, leaving more residual sugar in their beers, and even adding unfermentables like lactose to increase body and sweetness. This region never developed a taste for bitterness, and so brewers went for an extremely soft approach that was all juiciness.
The biggest difference in the two branches was not the trend in hopping, which was moving toward later and later additions, massive dry-hop loads, the ubiquitous step of whirlpool hopping, and lower and lower doses of bittering hops. It was in the malt bills, the yeast profile (less than the yeast itself—a number of West Coast breweries used English strains for the same ester-producing reasons East Coast breweries did), and the body and sweetness of the beers. There’s no doubt that the milkshake appearance, the fuller pillowy body, and the absence of bitterness were all developments of the New England school. Hazy IPAs are a thing; they’re different from West Coast IPAs and they have distinctive qualities everyone in the country now imitates. But the hop techniques were happening all over the country—not just the coasts.
The real shame in this battle between east and west is that it obscures something far more important. The elements of American IPA that connect the two coasts are themselves revolutionary. It starts with American hops and extends to the way they’re used. Post-kettle hopping and dry-hopping weren’t invented by Americans. But the way they shifted the emphasis from first-addition hops to hops added after flame-out, is entirely unprecedented. A 19th-century English brewer would be amazed at the sheer volume of hop matter Americans dump into their whirlpools and tanks. And even more, they’d be shocked by the flavor profiles these hops and techniques produce. Beer has been made by humans for 10,000 years, and in all that time, no brewer had ever created beers that taste like the ones Americans started making a decade ago. That’s the truly remarkable story.