Double Sunshine and the True Nature of New England IPAs
“When I first brewed a test batch with all Citra, it was so juicy. It’s like liquid sunshine!” (Photo: Lawson’s Finest Liquids)
The earthquake struck about ten years ago. It would take a better historian than I to identify a precipitating event, but by 2015, the phrase “New England IPA” was entering our vocabulary. What that term referred to was not yet entirely clear, though pretty quickly one element became the dominant marker: a cloudiness every bit as opaque as a Bavarian hefeweizen. It was such a distinctive feature that as breweries outside New England made these beers, the adjective became the style: hazy IPAs.
One of the breweries that helped spark this earthquake was Lawson’s Finest Liquids, which released Sip of Sunshine, one of the key beers of the era, in 2014. That was a line extension of sorts—the ur-ale, made on Lawson’s original nanobrewery in 2009, was actually Double Sunshine. The original has never been widely distributed, though—fans had to trek to Vermont to buy bottles and pints. This year, for the first time, Double Sunshine is getting a full roll-out, which offers a good opportunity to review the history and reflect on the meaning and nature of New England’s IPAs.
If you’ve ever had either of the Sunshines, you recognize the contours: they’re massive 8% beers with an alcohol-charged plume of juicy hop aromatics. The potent scents wafting off a glass are modern and fruity rather than piney or grapefruity. The beer has a lot of sweetness and body, which helps balance the freight train of hops and the alcohol warmth that numbs the tongue. But here’s the thing: they’re not all that cloudy. The picture at the top of the post exaggerates what is actually a slight haze.
And herein lies one of the more interesting ironies of our times: there is a distinctive New England school of IPA. But, despite sparking an international mania, haziness is less central to their identity than these other qualities: strength, sweetness, lack of bitterness, and high residual sugar. In fact, people like Sean Lawson and John Kimmich (creator of Heady Topper) don’t identify their beers with the hazy IPAs they inspired. Once hazies became a national style, they went their own way. But back in Boston and Burlington there remains a distinctly New England quality to hoppy ales. So let’s consult the Lawson story and see if we can find our way back to the true nature of the New England IPA.
Ordinary Origins
Sean Lawson’s background will be very familiar to anyone who has read the biography of an American startup brewery or few: he got interested in good beer in college, which led him to take up homebrewing. He was good at it, winning fans and ribbons in competition. Making beer remained a hobby for nearly two decades, and he used his environmental science degree to pursue a more conventional career. All the while, he kept visiting breweries while reading about and making beer until his wife encouraged him to start a brewery. He did, in 2008, founding Lawson’s Finest Liquids as a one-barrel side project he ran out of a shed he built next to his house.
His gastronomic evolution was also fairly typical. “I am a hophead by nature,” he told me. Like any homebrewer, he made a wide range of beers, but hops were always in the foreground. “I love my IPAs and IPAs are really my go-to beer. It’s what would be my first and last choice of any style of beer.”
We chatted about the evolution of IPAs and the breweries that inspired him. He name-checked Sierra Nevada, Long Trail, Harpoon, with a special nod to Greg Noonan at the Vermont Pub and Brewery (easily the most influential early brewer in New England). “IPAs literally turned me onto hops right away. I started brewing hoppy beers myself and got into that style,” he said.
One of the most important preconditions to the hazy revolution was the abject lack of hops in New England prior to 2010. I mentioned this to Sean and he agreed, offering this thumbnail history:
“I remember those days you’re talking about; there was a lot of Alan Pugsley’s Austin systems out there using Ringwood yeast and brewing English pub style ales which were decidedly not very hoppy or, if they were an IPA, they were an English IPA that was very much malt-driven and darker in color compared to today’s IPAs.”
No one pays much attention to a brewery’s environmental footprint anymore, but Lawson’s deserves praise for becoming a national leader in this area. They have the largest solar array in Vermont, built their taproom and brewery to be energy efficient, and built a wastewater treatment facility that generates energy in a digester. They are also active in philanthropic efforts in their community. Read more about their efforts here.
If a New Englander wanted a hoppy beer in those days, they had to look to the West Coast or make it themselves. Although Sean wasn’t making beer professionally during the 90s and most of the aughts, he was brewing at home, and his development tracked with the nation’s. He was reading about how to make hoppy beers, getting caught up in the IBU escalation, and working with all the grapefruit-and-pine American hops that defined the period before the late aughts. Listening to Sean reminded me of talking to John Kimmich discuss how he came to brew Heady Topper. For those brewers, it was all part of an evolution happening nationwide.
New England was an unusual place, though. It had one of the earliest and most-established markets for locally-made, small-batch beer—just one not much touched by the hoppy fascination of the West Coast. So when the Vermont breweries started releasing these hoppy beers, the region went from zero to ten overnight. IPAs changed American beer everywhere, but it happened on a highly compressed timeline in Red Sox nation.
The Birth of the Juice
A big part of that was the arrival of modern hops. The introduction of Citra was a watershed moment in the history of American brewing. That was the case everywhere—including the hop-soaked West Coast, but it was a critical precursor to the IPA renaissance that hit New England. Earlier American varieties were lively and full of character, but they were spiky hops. Citra introduced a softer, fruitier palate. That bridged the gap between the old New England palate and the new IPAs. For Lawson’s Finest, Sean’s discovery of Citra was the keystone moment in the brewery’s history.
“When I first brewed a test—just a 5 gallon batch—I did an all-Citra beer. It was so juicy and I was like, ‘Wow!’ It’s like chewing on Juicy Fruit gum it’s so fruity. It’s like liquid sunshine. That’s what I put in the press release, but that’s literally what I said, too.”
The old varieties were catty and dank. Citra was sunshine.
Lawson’s original brewery (Source: Lawson’s Finest Liquids)
New England IPAs were born post-Citra. I would argue an IPA wave was never going to wash over New England before it came along. The region’s preference toward fuller beers with sweet malts and fruity English yeasts, and they have never really embraced the bitterness and spikiness of Centennial or Chinook IPAs.
The development of New England IPAs was not unusual: breweries adjusted their process to draw out those incredible flavors and aromas Citra (and successor hops) had. Back in 2009, Sean optimized Double Sunshine to take advantage of Citras.
“Double Sunshine really hasn’t evolved much from the beginning. I was a very early adopter of big late-boil or whirlpool additions of hops and get most of the IBUs from that addition rather than at the front end. I think over time it has it’s evolved to have more and more late hopping, like even less at the very front end of the boil, a huge whirlpool addition.” The one change? “Initially, it was just one dry hop addition and now it’s double dry-hopped.”
The New England Style
Sean expressed some mystification that his Sunshine beers have joined the canon of classical Vermont IPAs, because he wasn’t shooting for the place hazies ended up.
“It’s funny. I’ve always said well when people point to Sip of Sunshine or Double Sunshine as one of the early forerunners of New England IPAs, I’m like I don’t consider them New England-style IPAs—but it is an IPA that’s brewed in New England! When I started out, those other early hazy IPAs were not at all like turbid and opaque the way today’s New England IPAs are. On our scale now, it is unfiltered, and there’s still a slight haze in there. But compared to a hazy IPA today or New England style IPA today, it’s pretty clear.”
When I spoke to John Kimmich about Heady Topper, he said much the same thing. Shaun Hill has gone to pains to separate Hill Farmstead from the New England tradition. I think what happened is that these foundational beers created such an immediate buzz that other breweries didn’t just imitate them, they upped the ante. By the time the phenomenon of New England IPAs was starting to reach the rest of the country, it was already in its second incarnation back home. A new generation of breweries had come along, and their beers bore the hallmarks of the mid-teens NEIPAs. They were also almost entirely free of kettle bitterness, extremely sweet (some of the finishing gravities a year or two either side of 2017 were as high as 6 degrees Plato), and often very strong.
We know what came next: breweries tried to out-juice each other, leading to hop burn and a chalky mouthfeel; they spent too much time trying to make their beers opaque that they didn’t notice they were also headless, gray things. But we also learned about thiols and biotransformation, dip-hopping and cool-pooling—techniques and concepts that have revolutionized the beer industry. The kinds of beers people were driving from New York City to Vermont to taste quickly led to perhaps the most potent trend within the craft segment … maybe ever. It went nationwide and now it is one of the most common style to find on a taplist. We don’t call them New England IPAs anymore, because they’re now too widespread. They have become hazies.
When I cracked a can of Double Sunshine last week (I confess it has been since well before Covid that I’ve had one of the Sunshines) it didn’t look like a hazy. It smelled like one—but now so do many hoppy ales. Yet there was something distinctive about it, something that instantly made me think of visiting Sally’s family in Boston and Maine. As hazies went national, they morphed to suit local tastes. In Oregon, they never went quite as sweet as New England, and today they’re often quite dry. More kettle bitterness has crept in. Breweries make them at double IPA strength, but this is not the norm.
Double Sunshine’s aroma depends on its strength. The alcohol volatilizes those hoppy scents, which give them a different quality. Perhaps higher alcohols play a role here; they often have a slightly overripe quality themselves, which turbocharge the fruitiness of modern hop varieties. Esters further enhance the fruity character. The New England-ness comes in next. The malts are full and sweet, and they act as a buffer for the warming alcohol and hop flavors. Somehow that full, sweet, boozy midpalate tastes different in New England than it does elsewhere. The Sunshines are both drier than some New England IPAs, but not dry.
Not every New England IPA is 8%, and yet that strength is really a marker of the style. Regular IPAs are typically north of 7% and double IPAs are common. The flavor and volatiles from the alcohol are a big part of New England IPAs. The haze? I mean, it’s a hugely important emblem, like that “B” you see everywhere (black and gold or navy and red). Yet when I think of the experience of the New England IPA, it doesn’t include that chalky, gummy, syrupy stuff that appeared in the teens. Some breweries may still favor sweeter presentations, and use techniques to goose the body and sweetness. But I wouldn’t call it a necessary element (and, honestly, that’s a good thing). And if the dense haze isn’t there, as in Lawson’s beers, it doesn’t change the overall presentation.
When he first started selling Double Sunshine, people lined up for it. Beers of that generation sparked a trend that took the style in a different direction from where Sean began. Now hazies are old hat and the lines have dried up. Interestingly, things may be coming back around to where they started. Sean is even considering what it would be like to move into legacy status.
“I mean if I can if I can emulate what what Natalie and Vinny [Cilurzo] have done at Russian River—after more than a couple decades they have such an iconic West Coast IPA. If in another ten or twenty years, [maybe] we can become the most iconic East Coast IPA,” he said. I smiled at his reluctance to use the phrase New England there. Maybe he was thinking of the hazier beers and the way New England has become tangled up with them. But hey, tasting the Sunshines again, I think they’re already there. They are classic New England all the way—even if they’re not hazy.