America's Hazy IPAs are Surprisingly Homogeneous

My editor at Craft Beer and Brewing, Joe Stange, tasked me with a tantalizing article idea: tease out the ways IPAs, and especially hazy IPAs, are made in different regions of the US. I thought it was going to be easy to discern these differences, since I was fairly familiar with the offerings in New England and on the West Coast. When I started speaking to writers and brewers from around the country, though, that’s not what I found. It seemed like they were all telling me the same thing. They characterized their observations within their regions, but they were reporting very similar consumer preference. Here’s Barebottle’s head brewer Magic Montes De Oca talking about the Bay Area:

Everybody is looking to make and describe their beers as extremely tropical. However, this is still California and the home of the West Coast IPA so dank, piney, and grassy flavors are also very commonly found, often blended with the tropical hops.

Everyone talked about how things seem to be coming back off the bleeding edge. Some bitterness is good, familiar flavors of citrus help anchor the beer, cloudiness is important, but shouldn’t be unsightly, beers should be at least somewhat dry. Okay, so that tracked with my preferences, but it seemed fishy. I thought the market was still demanding ultra-juicy, overripe tropical flavors in sweet, boozy concoctions. Sometimes brewers have a hard time distinguishing their preferences from their customers’, so I decided to run a survey to see what customers themselves were saying. I was really surprised to find that they were in broad agreement with the brewers, and especially surprised to find that there’s very little difference region to region.

 
 

Survey Results

After a poorly-worded first effort, I retooled the survey and asked people to tell me their own preferences in terms of hazy IPAs: preferred flavor types (citrus/pine/dank, tropical, stone fruit, floral, or berries), bitterness level, body (full and sweet to dry and crisp), and their preferred strength. Finally, I wanted to understand how popular hazies were relative to other hoppy ales, so I asked people to respond to this: “When I'm in the mood for an IPA, I choose a hazy (of any strength).” I started totting up the numbers when I reached 401 responses, with a good distribution across regions (the Mountain region lagged with just 22 responses).

Remember that “zero IBU” fad? Not so much. Just 6% of respondents said they wanted “very low” levels of bitterness. The rest of you were roughly split between “noticeable” and “moderate.” In terms of body, most of the country agreed they should be “fluffy but not heavy,” though New England was a slight outlier, liking theirs fuller and sweeter. (But only slightly.) You all want your hazy IPAs in a tight band of strength between, on average, 6.5% and 6.9%.

To the extent there was a difference, the West Coast and New England did stand as the most distinctive, but the differences were small. One place it emerged was most in the flavor preferences. The vast majority of you (83%) want your hazy IPAs to be tropical or citrusy (as Magic suggested in his quote at the top), yet there is some variation. The South, interestingly, loves tropicality the most, with New England a close second. In terms of citrus/pine/dank, the Great Plains actually edged out the West Coast. I was surprised to see berries and floral flavors do so poorly, but stone fruit has some backers on the West Coast and in the Midwest.

 
 

Finally, I was pleased to see that you all confirmed what we see in the sales data: hazy IPAs aren’t the dominant style you might imagine based on Untappd scores and what you find on brewery taplists. Only in New England are hazies preferred by a majority—but even there, just barely. No surprise, on the West Coast they’re the least popular. Still, I had to start the graph below at 30% to accentuate what are actually quite small variations.

You could quibble a lot along the way. These are self-reports, and people may not all agree on what “moderate” bitterness is or what “fluffy” feels like. But don’t miss the forest focusing on one tree here—the broad agreement is the real story, and it strongly points to national rather than regional preferences.

Before we go to that final graph, I’ll leave you with this quote from Austin Beerwork’s Will Golden. Although he’s speaking of what they’re seeing in Texas, I think he captures pretty well what’s going on nationwide.

“I have seen a drift up in IBUs for hazy beers in Texas. Also, hops are not just tropical fruit cup but pine, resin, and citrus-forward. I think there is somewhat of a “Soft IPA” fatigue that has people requesting more bitterness and less thick, sweet IPAs. We have seen a steady rise in the sales of our Fire Eagle, which is a beer that was designed 12 years ago for a market that loved bitter IPAs. This beer always had balance in mind with a mere 65 IBU. But by today's standards, that’s a wildly bitter IPA. However, the demand is steadily on the rise.”

Look for a deeper dive in a forthcoming article at Craft Beer and Brewing.

 
 
Jeff Alworth1 Comment