The Hazy and the Clear
This was a fun collaboration: Level Beer and Old Town Brewing each brewed a beer with the same hops and the same strength, but using those ingredients to make one beer a classic West Coast IPA, and one a hazy. They sell the beer in four-packs and you can try them side-by-side. Which naturally I did. Once I’d sampled them—for purity’s sake, I did so without inquiring about them at all—I reached out to Level and Old Town to hear how they’d made them.
The Beers
Let’s start with the beers themselves. Old Town’s was impressively clear for a NW IPA, while Level’s was mid-hazy (call it a 6.5 on the patented haze-o-meter). Both had citrusy noses, and I did consult the label to see the breweries used Mosaic, Meridian, and South African Southern Passion hops. Interestingly, neither had that savory note I usually get from Mosaic. In fact, Sally and I had a few drinks and declared them to be Mosaic-free before reading the label. The Hazy had a very distinctive mandarin orange aroma and flavor. The dominant note, it faded a bit into raspberry, Red Zinger tea, and stone fruit at the edges. It was a drier beer, not sludgy or sweet, and quite nice.
The Clear was a brighter, spikier beer. The citrus notes were edged with blades of bitterness. When cold, the orange note was quite subtle—Clear was more classic grapefruit and pine, with hints of melon. As it warmed, the malt emerged, as did the the mandarin. It never became as dominant as it did in Hazy. They were quite a bit different, but did bear a family resemblance. The bitterness was the most noticeable difference, which made me curious about how they were made.
The Process
As it turns out, the beers weren’t identical. Whether it’s possible to do a hazy and clear IPA from identical ingredients is a fascinating prospect, but Level’s Jason Barbee said they eventually decided “that doing that wouldn't really do justice to either style.” Hearing the differences in the ways each beer was made instead becomes a kind of primer in the differences between hazy and traditional IPAs. We’re starting to see a blending of the process in making these variants, so that they seem to be merging a bit. In the case of Clear and Hazy, Level and Old Town played it straight.
Steve Beaudoin went for a simple malt bill at Old Town in making Clear. “Two-Row and pils for the malt base, leaning slightly more on the pils malt. Just wanted to get a nice, lighter backbone from the malt, to really push the hop combo we selected forward.” At Level, Jason followed the hazy playbook as well, using both wheat and oats in the grist. Despite the differences in the malts, both breweries ended up with beers with similar hues. (Apologies for the poor quality of the photo below, as well as the less-than-spectacular glass cleanliness.)
The beers departed predictably when it came to the hopping. Jason hopped his the way Level makes most of their hazies. “We do a small 15 min addition just because we think it adds a little structure to the overall bitterness and hop character, a large whirlpool additions, and then we dry-hopped it right at the tail of fermentation.”
That contrasts with Steve’s approach, which is straight from the classic handbook on IPA production: “We kept a pretty standard 'west coast IPA hopping schedule in the kettle, with a big addition of Mosaic at start of boil to get some of that crisp bitterness in there, then some Meridian at the 75 min mark, and a little more Meridian at the whirlpool. We kept all the Southern Passion for the dry hop as we were really wanting to showcase that one the most, since its new to us personally—and probably to a lot of consumers.”
The breweries used a different yeast, with Jason opting for kveik. “We find that it generally finishes in a place we like, which as you have pointed out is on the drier side for hazy IPA, and it produces some really nice peach and other stone fruit esters.”
So there you have it: two beers that demonstrate how process can really change the way ingredients express themselves. As a final bit of color commentary, this is also a great example of why merely knowing which hops were used is basically useless. When the hops were used, in what combination, and for how long they were used in that form dramatically changes their expression. If breweries wanted to really accentuate that, they could do a single-hop version of this experiment in hazy and traditional IPA formats. Things like exposing the hops to a boil or not or using them while fermentation is active will cause them to produce very different flavors and sensations.
Fun experiment—more of this, please!