The Making of a Classic: Bert Grant and the Birth of American IPA
During this time of pandemic, when we have more time for reading than sampling new beers, I thought it would be a great time to explore some classic, much imitated (but rarely equaled) beers and what makes them tick. Click here to see other beers in the series.
When we look backward into the history of hoppy American ales, our eyes are drawn to Northern California. The details all seem to line up in a tidy narrative: the founding group of new breweries (De Bakker, New Albion, Sierra Nevada) made British-informed beers that harnessed the intensity of local hops to create a new lineage in American brewing. Their pale ales, and especially Sierra’s Celebration, a proto-IPA, form a straight line through history to the present moment’s hoppy IPAs.
It works well enough, but represents an impoverishment of the story. The West Coast was divided into segments, and the cities of Portland and Seattle followed a parallel but separate track to California’s. The breweries there had their own founders and in one is a historical lacuna that explains a great deal about the influences that guided hoppy ales in the Pacific Northwest. That forgotten figure is Bert Grant, who left the hops business to start his own brewery in 1982 and whose first beers created an instant appetite, decades ahead of the rest of the country, for hoppy ales.
Grant was a character. Trying to piece together the events of his life runs up against his habit of hyperbole and myth-making. What we can fairly confidently say is this. His father was a brewer and he entered the beer business in Canada as a teenager before going on to work for Stroh’s. He was fired in the late 1950s and became a consultant, working with a number of breweries, including Guinness. He did that work for about a decade before following his nose along the track of his true passion.
In 1967 he arrived in Yakima to work for the international hops company SS Steiner, where he developed the first US hop pelletizer. It seemed not just appropriate that he’d wind up in Yakima, but almost inevitable. Bert loved hops. In his time as a consultant, he served on the Hops Research Council and became a big fan of a new American cultivar that would later be named Cascade. His work there led to the job in Yakima and then, at the age of 54, to Yakima Brewing and Malting, the first brewpub in America. That bit of timing has secured his place in history, but it was his early beers that had the more lasting influence in the Northwest.
His first beer, and possibly his most audacious, was one he called “Scottish Ale.” It had nothing to do with Scotland, except that the romantic Grant has been born there and had nostalgic memories about the ales Scottish-Canadian brewers made in the 50s. (Grant’s facility did no malting, either, but both sounded good to his ear. Grant never let facts interfere with a good story.) It was, for its time—and even now, sort of—a crazy beer. Here he is describing it in his book The Ale Master (1998).
“The water came from the snowpack runoff in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains. The hops were Yakima Valley Cascades (the finest aromatic hops in the world), added at a rate at least three times that of any of the major US lagers. The bitterness units were about 40 to 45, which I think it should be. Our premium Northwest two-row barley was malted to the highest specifications by Great Western Malting in Vancouver, Washington.”
He wasn’t kidding about the hopping rate, and their flavor impact was even more profound: the beer was just 4.7% ABV.
In 1982, the concept of microbrewing was entirely novel (in the NW, drinkers had no little idea what the tiny breweries in California were doing). In the next few years, as breweries started to pop up, amateur homebrewers cobbled together crude systems with dairy equipment and spare parts and started selling beer commercially. Famously, Redhook launched to much fanfare with an infected yeast strain. Oregon breweries were doing better, but there was still a lot of “artisanal” variability to the products. Grant was known for quality. He quickly started finding accounts in Seattle and Portland, and worried local breweries who couldn’t imagine a market supporting more than one or two new brands. Grant’s had become so popular in Portland that by the time Portland Brewing launched in 1986, they secured a contract from Grant to make his beer for the Portland market.
And what kind of beer was Grant selling? After launching his brewery with Scottish ale, he quickly added two more British faves: Imperial Stout and India Pale Ale. These were both hop bombs as well. After an initial batch of a one-hundred IBU dark ale, Grant ratcheted down his 6.7% Imperial Stout to 75-80. (That the range reflects the batch-by-batch variability he achieved in his 5-barrel direct-fired kettle.)
India Pale Ale was his third beer, launched in 1983. Grant claimed it was the only commercially-made IPA on the market except Ballantine’s—a distinct possibility. Grant knew Ballantine’s and admired the beer it had been in the 1950s before later debasements by new owners. His IPA wasn’t a lot hoppier than Scottish Ale (around 50 IBUs), but it was a dry, sharp interpretation. Grant used Galenas for bitterness, but finished it with Cascade for what would become the region’s signature flavor. I wouldn’t discover craft beer for another few years, and can’t say if the recipe changed, but by the time I was drinking it around 1987-’88, I recall it being dry, pale, clean, and piney.
By the time of The Ale Master in 1998, Grant understood his legacy lay in IPA, and wisely let writers Michael Jackson and Roger Protz do the boasting for him:
Jackson described it as “ Pale, assertive, intensely dry, bitter aromatic style of beer. I was just stunned by the bitterness of it. I just loved the bitterness of it. The combination of pale color, aromatic hop character and an intensity of bitterness far exceeded any IPA made in Britain.”
Roger Protz discusses how Grant’s even influenced British brewers, and credits Grant with sparking the American trend. “The fact that people are re-creating IPAs with the right sort of strength of about six or seven percent of alcohol by volume, and a very intense happiness, says a lot for the pioneering work he has done.”
Grant’s beers had two big effects on the Northwest, both mostly forgotten. First, his standards of quality forced the other pioneers to up their game. As hard as it was for little breweries to convince drinkers to try weird beers with odd names, it was manifestly harder if their beer tasted bad—because Grant was already on the market. This shortened the period of adoption such that breweries found a large audience far earlier here than anywhere else in the country. Portland was already calling itself “Beervana” by 1994, and Washington boasted a few of the country’s first successful craft breweries.
But Grant also made hop bitterness and aroma familiar to Northwest tongues and noses. Before most of us had ever tasted craft beer, IPAs were already part of the landscape. Even when they made beers like wheat ales (Widmer) or amber ales (Full Sail), they were, by the standards of the time, assertively bitter. In most regions, a love of hops developed slowly. In the Northwest, it was fused with the birth of craft brewing. Importantly, “IPA” was a word we understood as early as the 1980s, even though most examples were one-offs, usually imitating Grant’s.
Because of his age and health, Grant didn’t build his company into a juggernaut. He sold it to a winery in 1995, and new management wasn’t sure how to develop the brand in the beer recession that followed. Grant himself died in 2001 and the brewery folded a few years later. By that time hundreds of breweries dotted the Northwest, including a few regional giants. IPA was evolving further, led again by innovations in hop varieties and products. Grant’s has become a footnote, famous less for its early influence than the brewery’s status as the country’s first brewpub. As IPAs have become the driver in craft brewing, plenty of other breweries and cities have been happy to take their credit. When people discuss the origins of the American palate and hoppy ales, rarely do they lead back to Grant. Yet nearly all the places they do lead (San Diego, Vermont) came much later.
There is rarely an ur-source for a beer style, and IPA has diverse parentage. But one of the most important figures was that mostly-forgotten character In a kilt from Yakima who sparked a passion for hops. His role deserves to be remembered. His beers were enormously influential, coloring the tastes not just of the people drinking beer at the time, but the generations of brewers who followed him.