A Brief Comment on Culture

Writing at length in Hop Culture, Grace Weitz describes Australia’s hottest home-grown beer:

Hargrave wants XPA to be that lower-alcohol, highly-hopped, flavor-packed, bomb-proof razzle-dazzle, “lean and tropical with a soft, lush, vibrant hop character, but you have a really drinkable beer,” he says. “And I can still walk to the fridge and get another one without falling over.”

This was news to me, a resident of Far Oregon, but it seems Australian XPA a real phenomenon. It’s spreading to the U.S., where it will almost certainly be described as a new style. We’ll see it on labels, breweries will embrace it the way they do all new trends, and brewers will have fun because they enjoy solving puzzles. But throughout her exhaustive treatment of the piece, Grace continued to struggle with vaporousness of the “style.” Is it really a new thing, and does it have coherence brewery to brewery? The problem here is a common category error: not every new trend is a new style.

Modern hoppy ales are a broad category that extend from 4-12% in strength, run the gamut in terms of color, bitterness, and hop expression. When a brewer tweaks the formula and gives a name to their new creation, we tend to want to use the lens of “style” to understand what’s happening.

“Is Australian XPA a (new) style?” is the wrong question. As Grace documents, XPA has become very popular, with breweries everywhere using the name and imitating the original. It’s definitely a thing. But that thing is far more cultural than stylistic. In the sunshiny, high-tax country of its birth, XPA hits the spot. People see the letters and understand that they’ll get a crisp, hoppy ale of around 5%. They aren’t beer geeks and arguments about grain bills or hop selection are way too esoteric (whether to use Galaxy is apparently the subject of hot debate among brewers). The better question: “is XPA a new trend in Australia?” And the question is absolutely yes.

Australian XPA probably won’t become an international style. It’s too nebulous and too close to beers we already have. Consumers will try it, shrug at the name, and think, “nice pale ale.” In a few years, we’ll have forgotten about it the way we did Belgian IPA, IPL, and brut IPA. For some folks, that might diminish its significance, as the only important styles are the ones that can survive decontextualized environments far from their place of birth.

But that’s thinking in style terms. It’s far more interesting to interrogate why it’s a trend in Australia. Here, context is the story—XPA is interesting not because it is something wholly original, but because it’s an Aussie thing. That doesn’t diminish the phenomenon; to the contrary, it makes it all the more interesting. I am far less interested in trying an American interpretation of XPA than I am in visiting Sydney to see why it’s popular there. Style is one useful way to think about beer, but it’s not the only way. Too often, it blinds us to something more interesting.

As a final comment, I’ll connect this point to the discussion last week about hazy IPAs. See what happens when you think of them as less a style than a function of beer culture. Does that change the way you think about them?

Cover photo: Balter Brewing