The Watershed Styles
Happy Halloween! This post has nothing to do with pumpkin ales or ghost stouts, but I wanted to give a shout-out to all who celebrate.
Instead of ghouls, I’d like to discuss the first line of my first VinePair article, which appeared yesterday morning. I don’t know how often I’ll write for VinePair, but it was a fun one-off where I looked at the strange, hard-to-assess fortunes of hazy IPAs. I didn’t end up where I expected, but I learned some interesting lessons. Go read it if you’re curious. However, back to that first line: “In the four-plus decades of craft brewing, arguably no other style has more profoundly changed what and how we drink than the opaque, fruit-smoothie sweet IPAs New Englanders started brewing in the mid-2010s.”
In my initial draft, the statement was even less qualified—I just flat out called it the most influential style in the craft beer era. I still think that’s true, and I’ll explain why below. But Jeff Wiser’s BlueSky comment at the top of the post got me thinking—what were the watershed beers that transformed American beer in this craft era?
Over those four-plus decades, we’ve seen a lot of churn. Some styles definitely seemed important at the time, but they turned out to be evolutionary Neanderthals, failing to thrive as stronger styles ultimately out-competed them. American wheat ale had its moment, especially in the Midwest and Northwest. Amber ales were a pretty big deal. Witbiers were the most unlikely contender, and they weren’t displaced so much as marginalized. Still other styles, like kettle sours, bourbon barrel-aged beers, and pilsners, have carved out important niches that can’t be overlooked. They have thrived, becoming solid fixtures on taplists, without becoming major stars—the character actors of the beer world.
Your mileage may vary, but I’d argue there have only been three truly transformative beer style in the US since 1980.
Pale Ales
Until 2011, pale ales were the best-selling craft style, basically going back to the launch of Sierra Nevada Pale. But it wasn’t their mere popularity that was transformative. In the 1980s, the US might easily have seen a revival in lagers. That’s what Jim Koch thought would happen when he launched Boston Lager. Yet pale ales used expressive American hops, Cascade principally, that captivated Americans.
Absolutely nothing that suggested that small-scale brewing would work in America. Despite trends in food and beverage, beer, with its economies of scale, didn’t seem like an obvious candidate for artisanal-ization happening elsewhere. Smaller breweries had been closing for decades. And, had those little breweries followed Jim Koch’s lead, things might have gone a different way.
But people loved these new place ales. They had never tasted anything like the citrusy zing American hops provided, and their growing love of that flavor helped win the day for hoppy ales. By the mid-1990s, almost all of craft brewing was oriented around ales, and pales were the best-selling style. Of course, that love led people to a different, even more expressive style.
American IPA
In 2011, IPAs finally displaced pale ales as the most popular craft style, but in terms of cultural impact, that change happened several years earlier. It was a result of consumers’ preferences coalescing around hoppy flavors, but boosted by new hop varieties bred specifically for this kind of beer.
For decades, Americans had been breeding new hop varieties, and a whole bunch came out that would later be forgotten: Galena, Eroica, Liberty, Chelan, Newport, and Mt. Rainier, just to mention the ones I recall. Throughout the 80s and 90s, breeders were shooting for high-alpha varieties, trying to meet the needs of the large lager brewers that drove the market at the time. Some of those hops were incredibly tasty, however, and brewers started using them in pale ales and IPAs—and that started leading breeders to think about a different audience.
New hops like Simcoe and Amarillo (both from 2000) gave breweries a way to add even more pop to their hoppy ales. And, despite making a small percentage of the beer, they used a lot more of these hops per barrel, giving growers a new market. In 2008, private breeders released Citra, which might as well serve as the date IPAs won craft beer-despite needing another three years to actually eclipse pale ales in sales. IPAs were now becoming deeply aromatic and flavorful, and the race was on to come up with new hops to give them even more juiciness.
The effect was nothing short of astonishing. In 2007, growers had about 30,000 acres planted, and three high-alpha varieties accounted for 56% of all the hops grown in the US. Acreage had doubled by 2022 and growers had 50,000 acres in aroma or dual-purpose varieties (read: craft beer hops).
During this period, craft beer went from fringe to mainstream as well. Prior to this point, mass market lagers dominated public spaces. If you went to a ball game or show, stopped in at a nice restaurant, or conversely hit a dive bar, craft beer was at best marginal. You might find a Sam Adams or Sierra Pale. But now the reverse is true. Mass market lagers haven’t vanished from the public space, but now they’re the marginal player. (The explanation has in part to do with statistical jujitsu: while mass market lagers remain the large majority of beer sold, that doesn’t accurately reflect the tastes of drinkers, the majority of whom at least sometimes drink so-called craft styles. It’s just that the casual drinker orders a pint with Friday dinner, and the mass market lager drinker buys in bulk.) All of this happened because Americans fell in love with hops and IPAs.
Hazy IPAs
In the two previous instances, the styles cut against norms as they grew in popularity. Hazy IPAs are a slightly different story, more about business effects than aesthetic changes. I know it’s apostasy to say this, but hazies were a tweak to an established style. Indeed, all IPAs were headed in the direction of being juicier, more aromatic, and just generally more intense. Breweries everywhere were amping up their whirlpool and dry-hop loads.
But hazies took these trends the furthest, and came all wrapped up in that Orange Julius appearance that made them the buzziest beer we’ve ever seen. Their story is more about what happened when a maturing market found a new way to sell a slightly new product.
Hazy IPAs had a massive effect on the business of beer. Their appearance made them a draft favorite and they brought people into taprooms. All that traffic led breweries to spin out ever new versions of hazy IPAs to give their clientele a reason to return. In every previous generation, you had breweries that made pale ales or IPAs, but with the arrival of hazies, you had breweries that specialized in them. (It would have been very weird, circa 1993, to walk into a brewery and see six pale ales on tap.)
It didn’t stop there. Cans had been making slow inroads into the craft segment, but when breweries started selling 16-ounce cans—usually out of their taproom—that attitudes really changed. Now people coveted the colorful, abstract cylinders and started to think anything in a can was special. (This blew the minds of olds like me.)
Hazies accelerated breeding and research into hop products and hop biochemistry that juiced the level of juice in every glass. The way hazies affected naming conventions and branding was literally unprecedented. All customers had to see was a dayglo can and a name like Ethereal Cloudbank and they knew what was inside. And those customers? The massive new millennial cohort came of age between 2002 and 2017, and entered their drinking years with beers purpose-built to appeal to younger palates.
I’m not sure where I’m going with all this, except that Jeff’s Bluesky post got me thinking. I suppose you could argue that pale ales, by virtue of establishing craft brewing as a viable industry, or IPAs, the parent hoppy style, we’re more influential than hazy IPAs. But it would be hard to argue that the most influential wasn’t one of these three.