What makes a beer style; where science, semantics, marketing and history collide. With brewers so readily pushing envelopes, there’s never been such a rapid development of beer styles, as there is today.
We love West Coast IPAs, like hard, and its metamorphosis has been incredible. So, I’d thought we would take a journey back, to see if we can find distinction between the sub-categories of American IPA. It’s also a shameless plug for our new San Diego IPA, being launched at next week’s Mixed and Matched dinner experience.
Original versions of American IPA would be copper in colour, with a balance between caramel malt sweetness and piney, citrusy and resinous hops. Hey, we had to start somewhere.
Over the last two decades, West Coast IPAs have taken that same hop lust but really dialled back the caramel malts, being much paler in colour. There is still some malt sweetness, balancing the bitterness from the hops. The focus is on flavour harmony between malt and hops, with that classic pine-y resinous character throughout.
Within the last 5 years, we have seen Cali IPAs open up a Modern West Coast character by drying out the malt component, and, per force, significantly reducing the hop bitterness. Due to the dryness, the bitterness may be perceived as high, while the actual IBUs are low. The impression is soft, dry and drinkable, with a focus on modern hop expressions of tropical fruits, stone fruit and unique floral notes.
Something that we have really noticed over the last year is the emergence of the San Diego IPA. And while individual beers within this category have been made for many years, it’s really only when a number of breweries, often from a distinct region, come together to create, and respond to, a growing market that a transformative, authentic style takes root. New England IPA is a great example of this. San Diego is often credited as the homeland of Westies, with a litany of world class breweries producing the best West Coasts in existence, like those from Ballast Point, Green Flash, Coronado, Stone, Karl Strauss and Ale Smith.
So it’s fantastically unsurprising that it was in this locale that an alternative to the haze craze was born. Enter San Diego IPA, a NEIPA drinkers Westie.
San Diego IPAs take that Cali sub-style and go extra sub. A more classically aromatic profile, with pine-y and grapefruit notes, melds with a softer body and moorish finish, compared to its northern Cali brethren. However, with the focus on flavour, softness, water chemistry and those same hop combos of the middle school Westies, its the perfect solution to those who love hop flavour, don’t enjoy bitterness too much, but also don’t like their beers too dry. A blend of styles that has been so successful, a little brewpub on the otherside of the world decided to give it a crack.
