How Hazies Changed West Coast IPAs

Travel back with me to the distant year of 2009. The hobbits dwelling in their holes in Far Oregon were busy making ales they drank themselves (they came in pints!), never sending them to the distant reaches of the civilized world. Thus did the ales of the Shire remain invisible to the peoples of the larger communities where important events transpired. Sometimes people would visit this green and overcast landscape, and chancing on a glass of ale, would find them curious indeed.

“But I was a bit surprised by how hazy the beers were overall, even taking into consideration the dry hopping,” wrote Stan Hieronymus over a pint of Double Mountain.

“In fact, we’ve seen plenty of hazy beers in Oregon (not just the ones made with wheat). I guess there is a pun in there about ‘partly cloudy,’ but I’ll pass.”

The ethnographer illustrated this observation with a glass of IPA that bore the wholesome opacity once considered completely typical of that style in Oregon (which was, even then, already the most popular type of beer by some distance).

Then came hazies.

Of course, you know what followed—I won’t drone through the next ten years, when “hazy” came to describe a very specific kind of IPA. The consequence, however, here in the middle-20s, is that the old partly-cloudy IPAs Stan discovered lo those years ago has become a rarity among new releases. Customers know hazies, and by the transitive property, they also know non-hazies, esp. West Coast IPAs. They are, you know, not hazy. The dense opacity of official-style hazy IPAs has thrown the identity of those half-hazy beers into question. To clarify matters (many apologies), breweries tend to brighten their non-hazy IPAs. If they go so far as to call them a West Coast IPA, they’re almost always bright and pilsner-shiny. The old school of Northwest IPA Stan documented are far rarer (even though we’re just as west as California is). In other words, hazy IPAs (TM) have nearly killed hazy IPAs.

I don’t want to oversell the point. Plenty of IPAs fall between perfectly bright and orange-juice opaque (especially older ones). There’s just a marked propensity in to make them clearish that never used to exist. Northwesterners used to be haze-indifferent. If an IPA looked like a pilsner or a hefeweizen, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The real question was—how does it taste? The freedom to be indifferent in these after-hazy days has gone. Brewers and marketers have to think not just about how a beer tastes, but what it looks like. A whole new generation of beer drinkers has come along with no memory of beer BH (before hazy)—and breweries don’t want to confuse their customers.

Were Stan to repeat this experiment today, I doubt he’d see fit to comment on the relative haziness of Oregon beer. This is neither, necessarily, a good thing or a bad thing, but it is definitely a thing. Consider it noted for posterity.

Fortunately, all our IPAs do still come in pints, and in the words of our Patron Saint of the Exuberant Drinker, Peregrin Took, I’m getting one.