Making of a Classic: Pliny the Elder
When Russian River released Pliny the Elder at the tail end of the last century (possibly), America’s infatuation with hops was still forming. India Pale Ale, a niche style just a few years earlier, was becoming the beer geek favorite—even though it would take more than a decade to become craft’s best-selling style. In a moment of evolution, brewers were pushing the boundaries on hop bitterness while still exploring what the original British style might have tasted like. American brewers were starting to revel in their homegrown hops, sparking a shift that would revolutionize what beer tasted like. Yet while some brewers were pushing intensity in their hoppy beers, others courted drinkability. The IPA style showed much promise, but no one seemed to create clarity from the chaos.
Pliny was a bright light in the fog. With the benefit of time, we can see that it reset expectations about what was possible. Americans were using IPAs as a template to explore extremes, and Pliny, with great strength and bracing bitterness, delivered. Despite its hurricane of flavors, however, Pliny was also more focused, refined, and elegant than other IPAs. And what a nose! While other breweries pushed their IBUs up, they neglected the innate flavor and aroma locked inside those emerald cones. Pliny revealed the full potential of hops and pointed to a juicy revolution that would define the style more than a decade later. When he designed Pliny, Vinnie Cilurzo demonstrated a future state for IPAs, when they manifested not just intensity, but the lush juiciness we now expect. It was an impeccably-composed beer that represented a clean break from Britain—and harnessed techniques that would become standards in later waves of hoppiness. Pliny the Elder was in many ways the first fully-realized, modern American IPA.
Background
In the late 1990s, the definition of IPA was very much up for grabs. The UK was still making classic old brands like Caledonian’s Deuchars and Greene King IPA, but at less than 4%, they didn’t seem especially relevant to Americans. Some brewers cast back further, to the original strong pales Britain sent to troops in India, which were very bitter and aged in wood. Stone and Portland Brewing experimented with oak, and the latter used hop oils to evoke America’s grand old gent, Ballantine IPA. Most brewers regarded the style as British and beefed up their malt base, typically with heavy loads of crystal malt. Many breweries also included English hops as a necessary tip of the cap to the ancient tradition they were borrowing. The era’s sweeter beers were built to handle stiff doses of hops, and brewers obliged, engaging in an informal contest to make the bitterest IPA around. Other breweries, like Harpoon and BridgePort, went a different direction by making gentler English-like versions that accentuated new-world hop varieties. These tasted American and became fantastic pub beers, but to achieve sessionabilty, brewers dialed back the flavor blast.
Vinnie amid the Blind Pig grundies with a glass of Inaugural Ale.
Vinnie Cilurzo was a young brewer who had spent his professional life making ultra-hoppy beers. His journey started in his original brewpub, the Blind Pig, in Temecula, CA. His roots in the style go, in fact, back to his very first beer there, called Inaugural Ale. It was very much a nostalgic take on IPAs, aged on oak chips for nine months and brewed to be served at the brewpub’s first anniversary in 1995. Vinnie even described it as an “English-style ale.” He had developed the beer as a homebrew recipe and scaled it up for the brewpub, thinking it would be a good way to launch the new venture. In a story he’s told many times, “Our equipment was pretty antique and crude, so I wanted to start out with something that was big and, frankly, could cover up any off-flavors.”
By the late 1990s, Vinnie’s reputation for making strong hoppy beers earned him an invitation to a double IPA fest in Hayward, CA. By then he was brewing at Russian River—then owned by Korbel, makers of sparkling wine—and not making a strong IPA at the time. The year was—well, that’s not so easy to trace. In Mitch Steele’s IPA, Vinnie recalled the year as 2001. On the brewery website, they list 2000 in one place and 1999 in another. Well, no matter. We can call it about twenty years ago. Here’s Russian River’s co-founder Natalie Cilurzo telling the origin story:
“Our friend Vic Kralj, who owns a bar called the Bistro in Hayward, wanted a double IPA festival. He contacted all the brewers he knew to see if they’d be interested. He’d heard that Vinnie was credited with making one of the first commercially brewed double IPAs at the Blind Pig, and so he called him. Vinnie made the beer and he wanted a big name for it, so we did what we used to do when looking for names—we drank beer and looked through old fashioned books.”
An Unusual IPA
The state of art for turn-of-the-century IPAs was a fairly heavy body, loads of bitterness and maybe a bit of post-kettle hopping. In some cases, still thinking of Britain, breweries used whole cones in hop backs. The presentation was a strong, full-bodied beer, typically with a sweet, caramelly base and extreme tea-like bitterness. The better examples had some aroma hopping, but it wasn’t unusual to hold a pint under your nose and detect just the faintest of hoppy scents.
American IPAs are probably older than you imagine. Check out an earlier piece on Bert Grant's remarkable IPA from 1983 to learn about the earliest example.
Pliny the Elder was a very different beer. When I spoke to him a decade ago, Vinnie contrasted his beer to another strong ale popular at the time. “If you want to know the difference between it and a barley wine, it’s got 3.5-4% crystal malt in it. So having a low level of crystal malt you really let the hops come through. They’re not being muddled by the caramel character.” As he described the grist, though, my mind went a different direction. “Also, we’re using a lot of sugars in the fermentables, dextrose sugar, so it’s drying the beer out and giving the beer a nice light, dry body. Super crisp, but really dry yet really bitter.” Using sugars to thin the body in a strong beer and dry it out for greater drinkability and a bright, golden hue? That sounds something like a Belgian approach, and in many ways Pliny seems like the child of old British IPAs that inspired Blind Pig, and a sleek, golden tripel.
Crystal malt would continue to be a signature feature of American brewing for more than a decade. (I called it out as a hallmark of the US tradition in The Beer Bible.) Now we consider it an antiquated flavor, but it was ubiquitous in pales, ambers, IPAs, porters, and stouts of the time. In Pliny, though, it was there just for color and a hint of balancing sweetness. Not only did it substantially shift the flavor profile away from cakey caramel flavors, but it cleared the way for those delicious hops. And here Vinnie was even further ahead of the curve. Listen to his description:
“We do use a lot of hop extract for the bittering of Elder. We do it for two reasons. One is to keep the vegetal matter down, and one is also—and this is just a secondary thing—we gain a lot of yield back. We do two dry hops; one at the end of fermentation and one in the middle of that twelve to fourteen day [period].”
Both of those techniques are worth examining. That tea-like quality so many IPAs of the time had came in part from the sheer tonnage of hops brewers were tossing in. They were extracting alpha acids, but they were also boiling a giant mass of vegetable matter for 90 minutes. The result was muddy, astringent bitterness. The real revelation is what he describes in the last sentence. No doubt you’ve seen the letters DDH accompany your favorite Galaxy-hopped hazy. It refers to “double-dry hopped,” a technique many assume arrived with hazies. Particularly important in their profile is a saturated fruitiness that is in part a result of an initial dry-hop addition near the end of fermentation. Active yeasts metabolize the terpenes and “biotransform” them, creating the juiciness fans crave. Vinnie was doing it twenty years ago.
“You mentioned Pliny the Elder as being bitter. This is a point I often bring up, even though the trend in IPAs has been to soften the bitterness. To me the bitterness is an endearing part of the flavor profile and keeps you coming back for another drink. Honestly I feel like many hazy IPAs could use a little more bitterness to make the mouthfeel more snappy.”
The beer was still (and remains) a classically bitter West Coast example, as typical for its time. But it was also tremendously aromatic and had such an arresting sense of flavor that many jokingly called it “Piney the Elder.” We weren’t yet using the word “juicy” to describe these qualities, not least because the modern crop of tropical hops hadn’t been bred yet (Citra was years from release). American hops at the time were all spiky with grapefruit, citrus rind, and pine, but they could be as aromatic and flavorful as more modern varieties. They worked very well will Pliny’s bright, clean bitterness.
In 1954, Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, and redefined what runners thought was possible. Pliny was like that. It tasted like an IPA; it was recognizable. But it was so much more intensely flavored and scented, and the presentation was so sharp and crisp and intentional. In the space of a pint we saw possibilities we hadn’t imagined before.
As an exclamation point about how revolutionary Pliny was, Vinnie even mentioned how hard he pushed to have people drink it fresh. This was, recall, during a time when a number of IPAs on the market had been aged, like the old pales sent to India. Yet his experience with those hop aromas taught him they were delicate and perishable. “If you see that label, the date is plastered all over and it’s all over the box,” he said. “To be honest with you, I think we are making headway with the consumers. They’re starting to understand that the hoppy beers need to be consumed as soon as possible.”
Evolution
The more I write about beer, the more I grow to appreciate refinement. Brewers who do the same thing over and over again bring beers into sharp focus. As I listen to the story of Pliny, it strikes me as very important that Vinnie had been refining as he went along. Pliny the Elder had moved pretty far from Inaugural Ale, which no doubt improved on his homebrewed beer. And along the way, Pliny itself has continued to evolve. I caught up with Vinnie recently to hear about the updates. He started by mentioning that the crystal malt is now completely gone, in part because it diminishes flavor stability. To keep the same golden color, Vinnie uses a slightly darker pale malt.
“As for the hops,” he wrote, “a few years ago we did a bunch of work and moved to just one dry hop addition.” He continued:
“Thus we took the total weight of the two additions and combined them into one. We were not seeing a difference in aroma so we simplified the process and went to one dry hop, and this also lowered the risk of oxidation. We didn’t receive one comment from consumers saying something has changed.”
These kinds of changes are routine for any beer that lives longer than a few years. In some cases brewers implement the changes because ingredients change, sometimes because they switched equipment, and sometimes—as with Pliny—for process reasons. As an Oregonian, I can attest to the effect of age on Pliny—it does dull with time, and any technique that forestalls oxidation is worth considering.
Although Vinnie was an early adopter of double dry-hopping, the use of dextrose, and stripping away caramel malt, he was surely not the first. This is a key point when we think about brewing history. If a brewer thought of a way to tweak a technique in 1999, it’s a sure bet another one tried it in 1989 or 1899. Humans are clever and creative. Laser-focusing on who was first to do something often distracts from a more important point.
(Though Vinnie certainly was ahead of his time. He added this note as if to emphasize the point: “Also keep in mind that Pliny the Younger had four dry hop additions way back when I first brewed it in 2005. And going even farther back I was making multiple hop additions to some IPAs at the Blind Pig Brewery in 1994.” As famous as Pliny is, and as well-respected as Vinnie is, he may not get enough credit for how early he recognized how to make proper American IPAs.)
The last great era of invention happened almost two centuries ago in Bohemia, Vienna, and Munich, when the use of English kilning techniques revolutionized lager-brewing. That is, until Americans came along. They used their own native hops, then borrowed and tweaked techniques from Britain and elsewhere to squeeze the maximum flavor and aroma from them. Pliny the Elder is such an important beer because it was the first to harness what would become standard techniques years later and put them to such impressive use. It reset expectations and brewers’ sense of possibility and pointed the way to the future we now inhabit.
Photos courtesy Russian River unless otherwise noted.