Vignette 39: The Alchemist's John Kimmich on IPAs
John Kimmich/source: The Alchemist
Brewer vignettes feature quotes I've picked up in my travels and writing. In this edition, I offer a slightly expanded narrative from the Alchemist's John Kimmich, the reluctant father of hazy IPAs and creator of the progenitor, Heady Topper.
Brewer vignettes we’re really supposed to be a short snapshot, a pithy quote that captured something essential about a brewer’s philosophy. If you’ve ever spoken to John Kimmich, you have encountered a quote machine. So today I offer a bit more, and it’s particularly apt given that we were speaking about IPAs for a piece I wrote for Craft Beer & Brewing last year. It was fascinating to me because he said so many things I wouldn’t have expected from the brewer most often credited with sparking New England IPAs when he canned the iconic Heady Topper. He started by telling me how his first boss, the late Greg Noonan, who taught him so much when he was at the Vermont Brewery and Pub. He picks up the story after founding The Alchemist.
Heady topper
“Early on in my brewing career, those West Coast IPAs were outstanding. When we would travel to California and Oregon and Washington, we would try really great stuff. What I loved about those West Coast IPAs was that firm bitterness and aromatic presentation of the hops. Some of what I don’t like about the style is what I changed through other processes and created my own mishmash.”
“When we got to open the Alchemist pub, that’s where I really got to have a free hand at whatever the hell I wanted to do. Through those years at the pub I made so many different recipes, so many different styles. You could brew Heady Topper as a West Coast. You could mimic that. You could do anything you wanted to do simply by manipulating malt bills and water treatments. So over those years of experimentation in that basement, that’s where I really developed my style and how I wanted to brew those beers. Through those years, of course, you’re talking to other brewers. This is not a static thing. Upon first brewing Heady Topper, it was a very, very different beer in that first year or two than people know today.”
“When we started putting Heady Topper in the can, there just wasn’t anything like that. And then suddenly when it exploded on the scene, everybody thought that I just blinked my eyes one night and made this beer called Heady Topper and the world went crazy. And they all want to replicate that. Maybe my take on IPAs was unique, but innovation and improving their beers was a common denominator. Everybody wanted to make the best IPA that they could. Here it was just us presenting our angle on IPA.”
“From day one, that was part of it. We wanted to be an iconic beer. That was a goal from early on. We wanted to be that Pilsner Urquell. We want to be like that Rodenbach, that Bass Ale, that beer that people know, that’s got that history, the brewery knows who they are.”
On The Hazies Heady Begat
“To see how that beer and the IPAs that I brew have influenced and redirected the style of IPA—it’s a crazy thing to think about. It began to explode in evolution. You quickly saw the acceptance of haze in an IPA, and like most things in craft beer, it’s like, ‘if you put in two, I’m going to put in three. If you put in three, I’m going to put in five.’ You saw a really rapid evolution in what hazy IPA even was. It quickly dawned on me that that has just moved way beyond our beers and our flavor profiles. For me, what I love in an IPA has become the middle of what people call hazy IPA and West Coast IPA.”
“A hazy IPA has become synonymous with soft, extravagantly soft, beers that are way beyond hazy into the realm of murky and muddy. It’s the nature of the business that more is better, more is better. But more often than not, more is more.”
“I’ve put countless hours of thought into pretty much any aspect of hopping a beer you can imagine. When I see breweries touting things like ‘nine pounds per barrel!’ it makes me a little angry, it makes me a little sad, and it makes me laugh sometimes. It’s preposterous and it’s a complete waste of hops. It makes me mad because it’s a total waste of resources. It makes me sad because those beautiful little hops are just not being respected. It makes me laugh because—you gotta be kidding me—who is doing their accounting?”
“I have very definite ideas about what level of dry-hopping is beautiful. Do I want to release that to the world? Probably not, but I will talk about it in the sense that what I am looking for in an aroma in my IPAs and what I love the best is that fresh, out-of-the-bag aroma, that’s what I want in my IPAs. Like opening a jar of perfectly cured, dank, sticky nugs and that wall of aroma hits you—that’s it. That’s the stuff. Over the years I’ve taken it up to multiple pounds, less pounds, and I’ve found the sweet spot for me.”
“So often, when I’m trying these beers that are super-dry-hopped, and everybody talks about biotransformation, and absolutely, there’s a lot of science to that stuff, but that change in the aroma that is something that I personally associate with sweet, chalky, baby-aspirin aroma. There’s a change in the aroma, that overripe tropical fruit, that squishy brown mango. So not only are these beers finishing—in my opinion—outrageously sweet in terms of gravity, but add on top of that the extreme dry-hopping that emphasizes all those things. Then it’s just like, I don’t know, candy—it’s not something I’m looking to [drink].”
“That classic IPA flavor has been loved. There’s a reason people are drawn to that balance of bitterness and sweetness and aroma and all of that. Somewhere along the line that more-is-better [philosophy] just went off that track, and it started to create a beverage that I would have a hard time calling an IPA at times.”