Juicy-dank: The New Portland IPAs
Something is afoot with Portland IPAs. We are long past the point where hoppy ales go through transformational change in the space of months—too many brewers have been making IPAs too long to have missed something truly revolutionary. But evolutionary changes may be just as significant, and an experiment that began a few years back is starting to mature into something more stable around these parts. It happened when the two major American IPA lineages began growing together, but then took an unexpected turn. This is one of those reports-from-the-home-front pieces, but where IPAs are concerned, trends have a way of spreading—so look for IPAs like these near you, if they haven’t already arrived.
We’ll revisit the history in a moment, but let’s start with Great Notion’s new mashup, West Coast Ripe as a case in point. In 2016, Great Notion became Portland’s emissary from the land of opaque, ultra-soft IPAs gaining traction in New England. Their twin flagships were Juice and Ripe—beers with metaphors for names that would prepare drinkers for the flavors they’d find. Great Notion so fully cornered this market that while everyone else made hazies, no other breweries attempted the business model flourishing in New England (see Hill Farmstead, Tree House, and Trillium). Great Notion owned the hazy identity, and Ripe was one of the emblems of what a hazy should be.
So when they released a West Coast version of Ripe this week, it was a genuine surprise. I stopped in for a glass and was even more surprised. In the announcement, Great Notion noted, “but this new [Ripe] has some well timed hot side Citra additions that add some punchy West Coast bittering.” It does that, but more, the all-Citra hopping goes “juicy-dank” in flavor. Instead of pure fruit, Great Notion amped up the allium to go with the fruit. It’s a deeply saturated hoppy ale, with an intoxicating lemon-garlic nose. It’s weedier on the palate, with a general citrus note that turns lime as the beer warms. As is typical with this kind of beer, the brewers didn’t accent one of the notes with the other: they turned them both up to max and let them fight it out on your tongue. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, and it may even seem like it over the course of the first, bewildering mouthful. By the end of the glass, however, it had become my favorite Great Notion IPA, and one of the best IPAs I’ve had this year.
And it’s not an anomaly.
Four Paragraphs of History
Portland IPAs (Oregon, really), have always been their own thing. Going all the way back to the mid-90s, when BridgePort released their medium-bitterness, high-aroma, proto-juicy IPA, Oregon IPAs have deviated from California’s. (Washington identity has been less distinct.) For the past quarter century, Oregon IPAs have featured a medium body and medium-dry finish, strong aromatics, medium to medium-high bitterness, and—this is important—haze. They weren’t Orange-Julius opaque like New England hazies, but they almost always had a kellerbier shimmer.
Boneyard’s characteristic haziness. Photo courtesy Chef Ben at Boneyard.
Key beers that came along included Ninkasi’s Total Domination, which was the first beer with intense aromatics, Deschutes’ Fresh Squeezed, which radically dropped the IBUs, and Boneyard’s RPM, with brought everything together.
Hazies presented a competing paradigm. What had been a single if shaggy lineage split with Great Notion’s debut. In one curious side-effect, hazies prompted breweries to clear up their non-hazies. But while they were clearer, they continued to feature most of the Portland DNA, with the midrange bitterness and citrus juiciness (rather than tropical fruit juice) along with lush atomatics. Beers like Breakside’s IPAs, pFriem IPA (both sponsors of the blog!), Block 15 Sticky Hands, Barley Brown’s Pallet Jack, Boneyard RPM became standards of the non-hazy school. And, despite the thousands of new hazies Oregon breweries made over these years, the regular IPAs were, by volume, vastly more popular.
Sometime during the pandemic, the hazy trend began to flag somewhat, and I noticed a return of kettle bitterness. This was true even with hazies. While some breweries continue to make very sweet, soft, ultra-juicy IPAs, the lines in most places are breaking down. That shimmer is returning to non-hazies, and hazies are drier and sharper. Even though we still talk about hazies and non-hazies in Oregon, they’re starting to track back in the direction of a shaggy range rather than distinct lines.
Juicy-dank’s Patient Zero
The evolution happened slowly and organically, a brewer response to what drinkers wanted and a drinker response to how breweries were tinkering with the blueprint. Amid this, one beer arrived that was a real outlier. Whereas the natural evolution was bringing together the cannabis/citrus/pine of classic US hops with the tropicality of more modern hops, brewers were shooting for harmony, leaning into either one flavor basket or the other as the dominant profile. Then Von Ebert unleashed Volatile Substance.
It was very dank and very juicy. The brewery didn’t harmonize; they threw the dank and the juicy into the whirlpool like two cats in a bag. The flavors were turned up so far that the first few sips are pure confusion. We’ve trained our tongues to expect certain flavors that go together, and certain flavors that don’t. If an IPA is supposed to be tropical and fruity, it shouldn’t also be full of cannabis and garlic. My first reaction was, “This is just wrong.” But a half a glass in, my second was, “Wow, this is kind of amazing!”
Amusingly, when Patrick and I conducted our great Oregon vs. Washington IPA smackdown on the podcast, Patrick initially didn’t want to advance what turned out to be Volatile Substance. He thought it was too weird. I fought for it and we did send it along, and by the finals round he had completely reversed his opinion. We gave it the gold. I think most people go on a similar journey. It shouldn’t work, but it does. (Notably, it won both the GABF gold and the Oregon Beer Awards gold in the same year.)
(Since this is a Oregon-specific trend piece, I pretty much have to mention the arrival of cold IPA, which Kevin Davey was busy popularizing in Southeast Portland. I’ve argued that cold IPA is less a style than a technique, but the result is a “loud” beer (“It needed to be loud,” Kevin said. “It needed to be brash. I have all these low-intensity beers [at Wayfinder.] This was going to be my intense beer.”) After half a decade with very sweet, soft IPAs with intense fruity flavors—day-glo IPAs—Portland has been returning to edgier ones. The juicy-dank beers are one manifestation, cold IPAs another.)
It’s why the West Coast Ripe seems like an important inflection point. These kinds of beers—and I’ve had great variations from Ruse as well—are probably too intense and weird to become the new standard. Instead, they seem to augur a new swing of the pendulum back toward an edgier, sharper, more challenging kind of IPA—exactly the kind of beers to which hazies acted as an antidote.
After nearly a decade of fruit juice, drinkers may be looking for something a bit more racy—at least in Portland. These beers aren’t challenging in the manner of those ultra-high BU beers of the aughts, but more in the vein of a really pungent blue cheese. I suspect they’ll be just as divisive, too. They definitely have me hooked. If you’re near Portland, pop into Great Notion and see what you think.