Sightglass: Cold IPA is a Technique, Not a Style
This is the latest chapter in an ongoing collaboration between the Beervana Blog and Reuben's Brews. In today's post, I address a couple questions involving the hottest beer in the taproom: cold IPA. It is often presented as a new style, but is it really new—and is it really a style? All will be revealed below!
In most industries, product formulations are crown jewels companies use physical, legal, and mystical means to protect. By contrast, brewers are lucky to hang on to a new technique more than a few months before it spreads to half the breweries in the country. Sometimes, however, a technique is so mundane it escapes notice, flying under the radar for years before it becomes more widely known. Fermenting a West Coast IPA with lager yeast for a clean, bright profile is one example.
Brewers have been doing this for years, and not to make India Pale Lagers or other sub-styles. They quietly switched yeast just to make their IPAs pop. “It’s a trick that a lot of brewers use and they just don’t say it out loud,” Wayfinder’s Kevin Davey admitted to me recently. (Any time someone mentions cold IPA now, they are contractually obligated to mention Kevin’s name.) “By 2020-2022 when this whole thing erupted, I was like, ‘Cat’s out of the bag,’” he said.
When he developed Relapse, the first Wayfinder beer using the cold IPA name, Kevin was trying to make his perfect West Coast IPA, one that was incredibly clean and vivid, an echo of the classic California examples—Racer 5, Pliny the Elder, Union Jack. He had been using lager yeast to make hoppy ales for a number of years already, but in engineering Relapse he added a few other touches. Now you can find cold IPAs everywhere, but you can also find brewers using Davey’s techniques to make beers they just call IPA. And indeed, Kevin was just trying to build a better IPA himself. So now we come to the existential question: does that make this a new style, or a new way to make an old style better?
This is what happens when I do my own graphics.
Origins
Since all cold IPA roads lead back to Wayfinder, let’s start with how Davey got here. Back in 2014, he was tasked with making an IPA at Gordon Biersch, where he landed after fleeing the sun of Paso Robles, his previous job brewing at Firestone Walker. “It was born out of: how can I just make something like Union Jack at a lager brewery?” They had a great yeast that now seems to be the default for cold IPAs, 34/70, one version of Weihenstephan’s lager strain. It had everything he wanted—it fermented warm for a clean profile, and he liked the very slightly elevated SO2 level, which seems to act as an antioxidant, preserving aromas. His first experiments began there, and he liked the results.
(It’s worth noting that Kevin wasn’t the only brewer using lager yeast to make IPAs. One name that comes up regularly is Bob Kunz, founder of LA’s Highland Park.)
When Charlie Devereux began planning Wayfinder, he created a brewery built for making lagers and found a brewer with a background brewing them professionally. Kevin had worked at Chuckanut as well as Gordon Biersch, and stepped in to make Wayfinder’s great selection of lagers. But they also needed hoppy ales—this is Portland, after all—so Kevin took advantage of Wayfinder’s particular brewhouse configuration, which is purpose-built for decoction and cereal mashing. This is the second piece of the cold IPA formulation: the use of corn or rice to strip the beer down to its hoppy essence.
“I was trying to make more of a West Coast IPA, but with a clean profile. I didn’t want it to be an overly malty-flavored beer. That gets in the way of the hops. It needed to be loud. It needed to be brash. I have all these low-intensity beers [at Wayfinder]. This was going to be my intense beer.” The use of corn helped facilitate that. “Corn and rice do have a level of mouthfeel. It’s interesting, even pouring pitchers back and forth to de-gas a sample, you can tell which one’s a cold IPA and which one’s not.”
Finally, Kevin’s use of hops looks a lot more like a traditional IPA, pre-hazy era. “I don’t use the New England approach—cool whirlpool, lower BUs, and no bitterness units.” Instead, he hits his cold IPA with 35 BUs at the start of boil (a combination of Flex hops and German Magnum or Porlaris), adds another heavy addition with ten minutes to end of boil, and finally, a big whirlpool addition—but straight from the kettle, uncooled. Kettle bitterness is a big part of the flavor profile, though the German hops and water treatments give Wayfinder’s a smooth, fine quality.
Davey has experimented with dry-hopping techniques in making his cold IPAs, but his simplified approach is pretty common for modern hoppy ales. He pitches at 55F and in less than 24 hours the fermenting wort is up to 65F, where he holds things for the remainder of fermentation. Dry hops go in near the end of fermentation, to capitalize on biotransformation as well as short-circuiting hop creep. He has experimented with dip-hopping (adding the hops before pitching the yeast) and other techniques as well. Except for the use of lager yeast, these are common practices.
So here we are, back at the existential question. Is this a new style, or a menu of techniques Davey developed to make an IPA IPA-ier?
Kevin Davey
Cold IPA or Just IPA?
Styles are an increasingly fraught subject, especially those involving the letters I-P-A. One of the ways to tell if you’ve got a new style is whether anyone notices when you call it by a different name. Using Davey’s techniques in beers not labeled “cold” is apparently quite common. Corey Blodgett makes Yeah, We Got Beaches on the bank of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee at Gathering Place. He describes it as a “DH Midwest IPA” because, as he explains, “the majority of the ingredients [come from] Wisconsin, including the Mackinac hops.” But the label doesn’t mention cold IPA (which shivering Packer fans might find confusing about half the year, anyway), though that’s what it is.
Corey is possibly the country’s leading kölsch evangelist, so it’s no surprise his yeast of choice is a strain from Cologne. But otherwise, “I try to do as many techniques as possible on our small system. You can ask Kevin. I bugged him incessantly about the techniques while giving him a bit of a tease about the name cold IPA.” In fact, he did run trials with lager yeast, but his team and customers preferred the kölsch strain—perhaps a regional preference. He ditched the name because he didn’t think it would help customers understand the beer.
Matt Brynildson recently wrote about Firestone Walker’s newish Hopnosis for Craft Beer & Brewing. Outwardly, the brewery touts the beer for its use of Cryo hops. It’s a flashy IPA that uses nine varieties of hops and, as the name suggests, leans heavily into their mesmerizing effects. Yet as Matt writes, they ferment Hopnosis with their house lager strain. They seem to be taking a page from Davey’s book (per those contractual obligations, he name-checks Kevin—but also Kunz): Firestone starts at 54F and lets it rise to 64F, and “as an added benefit,” he writes, “that small amount of SO2 produced by the lager yeast should improve our flavor stability.” If cold IPA is a style, Hopnosis is a high-profile example, though you don’t see those words on the label.
Calling a beer cold IPA can be a great marketing device and a fun way to draw drinkers back to clean, bitter IPAs. But is a style that can pass for another really a style? The fact that other brewers just call these beers IPA is one reason to doubt it, but more importantly, if customers can’t distinguish them from other IPAs, it may be a distinction without a difference. That is not a universal view, though, and Blodgett disagrees, despite the soft subterfuge of his own kölsch IPA (you see what I did there?). “I think cold IPA is a bit different than a traditional West Coast IPA in flavor. A cold IPA, for me anyway, comes off as dry but with a pleasing sweetness hidden in the background. West coast IPAs are wonderfully dry and bitter but do not have that hidden sweetness. Both are delicious in their own way.”
Either Way, a Process Beer
Whether we call it a style or not, Davey and others deploy a menu of techniques to create these beers. They become further tools a brewer can reach for, like ferulic acid rests or underpitching yeast, to achieve certain benchmarks in the way a beer looks, feels, smells, and tastes. We’ve already discussed lager yeast and warm fermentations and what they bring to the table, but let’s go a bit deeper on the use of corn or rice. In terms of techniques, this piece may be as important as the use of lager yeast.
Davey offered a bit of background. “American malts were born and bred to be adjunct malts,” he began. “Not everybody wants to talk about it, but they’re not great for all-malt beer. I’m trying to take the American approach to my malt. If this is the malt we can get in the states, so I’m going to add adjuncts.” For Kevin, the lager brewer, this seemed obvious. It may not be for other brewers, however, many of whom saw cereal cookers as symbols of debasement, not just a tool in the brewhouse. Good brewing, for many brewers, means all-barley beer.
In cold IPAs, though, using corn or rice offers several advantages. It keeps the color pale and cuts through the high protein level. There are other, subtler advantages. “We would probably have more color problems because we’d have a higher FAN level—and FAN plus heat equals maillard reaction in the kettle,” he said. Kevin wasn’t shooting for a lager-like beer, but rather was working with the malt he had on hand to create the profile he was looking for. He understands European malts and what they bring to the mash tun. In their lagers, “We try really hard to use the most expensive grains we can find and the best hops, and a long, cool fermentation, and a long maturation.” That’s not what he was after in cold IPA. “This is a quick thing. It’s a quick, hoppy thing.” Take all of them together, warm fermentation with lager yeast, kettle-hop bitterness, and the use of adjunct grains, and you have techniques that create the profile Kevin was after.
In the vast, amorphous realm of American IPAs, styles, sub-styles, and marketing inventions all swirl and blend together. This post addresses cold IPA, but we could just as easily ask existential questions about any of the the other -IPAs—session IPA, milkshake IPA, black IPA. What makes the case of cold IPA more interesting is that the style (nonstyle?) is built on a series of real, specific brewhouse processes. Whether the name cold IPA survives or not is really beside the point. Brewers have figured out techniques to achieve a profile they want, and that’s cold IPA’s real value. Even if the name fades, these techniques won’t, and they’ll be used to make tasty beers long for a long time to come.