Entering the Confusing, Post-Hazy World
Have a look at an old BridgePort IPA circa 1997. How would you describe it?
I mean, it’s pretty hazy, but is it Hazy™?
Over the summer, my sense of IPAs has started to fray. Used to be that hazy IPAs had recognizable characteristics: 1) thick body, 2) murky to opaque appearance, 3) an intense juiciness that came from new-variety hops and English yeast strains, 4) low bitterness, and 5) quite a bit of residual sweetness. They were distinct from regular IPAs in everything except the juiciness, with some Venn-diagram overlap in appearance among the least-hazy hazies and most-hazy non-hazies. For the most part, though, they were easy enough to distinguish.
In truth, I don’t think those clean lines were ever quite so clean. Progenitors of the Vermont hazy school didn’t adhere to all of them—particularly the bit about being very thick and sweet. Meanwhile, IPAs in the Northwest were already hazy—or “cloudy,” as some contemporaneous ethnographers described them. Yet for a few years, the notion of haziness captivated drinkers—even though I don’t think all that many people fully understood the contours of the style. It had salience to consumers, even if their understanding wasn’t rudimentary. That seems less and less true, as the two varieties become more alike.
Everything’s Juicy
Portland’s Old Town Brewing recently launched what they hope will be a new flagship IPA. That’s it there to the right (or above, if you’re reading on your phone). It’s not hazy or even cloudy; call it misty. It looks like a pre-hazy Northwest IPA, but it’s made with Citra, El Dorado, and Amarillo, juicy hops all. The palate is somewhere halfway between juice and grapefruit/pine, but with a pretty decent dose of bitterness. To average customers, it will tick the boxes for what an “IPA” is, and I wonder if they’ll care beyond that.
Hazy IPAs emerged as a consequence of new hops, but they weren’t the only IPAs using them. All IPAs were getting juicier at the start of the 2010s. Brewers loved the tropicality of the new hops, and they were gravitating toward later additions to squeeze the juice from them even as Vermonters were getting attention for their hazier versions. This trend has been a long time coming, and it has jumped continents. Not only are breweries everywhere making juicy ales, but hop growers started breeding for them a decade ago—which is why all these new fruity varieties are now coming from the UK, Germany, France, South Africa, and Slovenia. People just love the juice.
In a parallel trend, all IPAs were getting less bitter. The late 90s and aughts were the time of the great bitterness arms race, in which breweries vied to create beers ever more punishing than the competition. At a certain point, we all awoke from that bizarre trance and realized these were terrible beers. Whether they were making hazies or not, brewers dialed down the bitterness so it wouldn’t clash with the amazing aromas and flavors the late-addition hops were providing—and thus began the march toward juiciness.
Hazy Shift
Non-hazies weren’t the only beers on the move. Hazies have been slowly morphing as well. At first, they pushed the boundaries of sweetness, thickness, and opacity on their way to maximum juice. As in the bitterness race a decade before, this resulted in some pretty bad beer. The lack of balance meant you had to drink fast or end up with goopy, treacly messes by the time you got to the bottom three fingers of beer. Breweries discovered a point at which more hops couldn’t increase fruitiness, but could give a beer weird weedy off-flavors. Compounds like pholyphenol and humulinone, so small they didn’t register under normal brewing conditions, were producing a plantlike bitterness as a result of the tremendous amounts of hops brewers used. Americans, always keen to push things to the limit, found them in hazy IPAs.
Since the most extreme examples came out, breweries have dialed them back, using attenuation and bitterness to balance the perception of sweetness the newer hops create. They also quit trying to make the beers ever more muddy with oats and wheat, selecting malt bills that would offer the flavor rather than opacity they sought. After all, that juiciness—the quality drinkers sought—didn’t depend on hefeweizen cloudiness, and a layer of malt flavor added complexity to the palate.
I’m less confident about what’s been happening with yeast, but my sense is that breweries are experimenting there, as well. Yeast strains produce their own particular constellation of esters, and not every brewer is equally in love with them. Other strains offer different ester profiles, giving brewers more flavor options. English strains aren’t essential.
Finally, consumer demand for hazies has been less obvious nationally than it has on blogs and beer Twitter. Despite a series of national launches (remember Sam Adams’ New England IPA?), only Sierra Nevada’s Hazy Little Thing has achieved real traction. And it may not being a very good proof of concept, since it’s one of those borderline hazies. It’s drier, less sweet, and less hazy than many. Selling double oat creams in four packs has been a spectacular business model for a select group of breweries, but they represent fractional volume nationwide. I interact with a lot of regular drinkers, and my sense is they’re still pretty fuzzy on what the term means—beyond a basic adjective, akin to black or double IPA. As phenomena go, hazy IPAs have been weird: hugely important among engaged drinkers, and somewhat overlooked by supermarket shoppers.
Meeting in the Middle
Regular and hazy IPAs have been moving toward each other for years. Non-hazies were getting jucier and less bitter while hazies were getting less sweet and less opaque. Now IPAs have characteristics that blend the two. Clarity, sweetness, bitterness, and body are all up for grabs. We see dry hazies. We see hazies made with low-ester yeasts. We also see a broad acceptance of juiciness across IPA subtypes. I have encountered quite-hazy beers that are fairly dry and have decent levels of bitterness. I’ve encountered low-haze beers that are extremely juicy and lack bitterness. Appearance was once enough to distinguish the two, and that’s not really true anymore.
Haziness is not going anywhere, and neither is juiciness. I can’t imagine a 2030 where all IPAs are clear and bitter again. Modern hop varieties are just too succulent to imagine toning down. The meaning of “hazy” is losing coherence and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it fade away over time. Now that most consumers understand IPAs can be hazy, there’s really no reason to exaggerate opacity, and haze is hard to eliminate in very juicy beers. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a 2030 where the term “hazy IPA” has fallen out of use.
As an Oregonian, this makes a lot of sense to me. IPAs have been hazy here for a long time, so much so that when the mania for “hazy IPAs” arrived in the middle 2010s, I didn’t understand what people were talking about. It seemed like a false dichotomy to me at the time—and I wonder if that’s not increasingly how people will see it going forward. In the post-hazy era to come, “IPA” will be the important designation.
To illustrate the point, let’s return to that picture at the top of the post. It’s a BridgePort IPA, first brewed 24 years ago. (That particular photo was taken in 2008, but it’s what the beer looked like when it arrived in 1996.) Haze has actually been around a long time and isn’t going anywhere. But maybe we can dispense with the “hazy” and just talk about IPA.