Which Hazy IPA is Beautiful?

I am transcribing a wonderful interview/tour I did at Manchester’s Cloudwater Brewery in the UK. It’s a brewery in the modern style, with lots of hazy, hoppy beers. During my chat with co-founder Paul Jones, he mentioned something I’ve pondered quite a bit: the aesthetics of hazy IPAs. And here he meant that very dense, weissbier haziness: “I think hazy is not a good word because it's used for everything from that [appearance of] just a dry hop in an otherwise bright wort, [where] you just get a bit of softening of the light coming through. And then it's obviously used for highly turbid beer where you can't see the light through them.” His view?

“For me, visually, there should be a nice hue. I’m definitely more about a glass of orange juice than a glass of mud.”

I assume this is the mainstream view, but we’re in uncharted territory here. The race to make ever-murkier beer led to quite a bit of excess in the early days. So there’s the dimension of opacity—how hazy is too hazy? There’s also the color issue. Wheat and oats add no color—thus they were called “white beers” in Europe—so some hazies are very milky. Others tend in the orange-juice direction Jones prefers.

So, consider this an invitation and an inquiry. If you were ruler of all beer, what would you dictate they look like?

PHOTOS: CLOUDWATER BREWERY