CONTROVERSIES: IPA Edition

This post could’ve just as easily been titled “Even More Rambling Thoughts on IPA”, but I decided to go with the momentum of the past month’s motif & highlight a few of the debates swirling around the craft beer ether.  Plus, I have a love/hate relationship with listicles: a few actually offer some substance, & the ones that are complete fluff at least give me the chance to scroll through & tick which ones apply to me.  You’re probably rolling your eyes over me devoting another post to IPA, but it really does captivate me right now – the beer AND the phenomenon.  And it’s got its own little list of debates going, which, again, may or may not be of any real consequence to the reader.  Just a little food for thought.

Wet-hopping.  I’ll admit that fall is my favorite season for seasonal beers.  I love pumpkin beers, Oktoberfests, & I get excited for the fresh-hopped harvest brews that come out after hop-harvesting season.  Hops fresher=beer better, right?  The dialogue is moving more toward “Eh…”.  Sure, the good stuff is bright, the volatile oils are fresh, but you get a lot more plant matter in there too than you do with dried hops.  All that extra green can impart grassy or even vegetal notes.  The same oils are present if the hops are kilned & used shortly thereafter (as is done in standard, “non-wet” practice), but without that chlorophyll component.  So wet-hopped can mean the good plus some of the not-so-good, while using kilned hops is just the good.  “Good” & “bad” are subjective, here – if you like the grassy elements, then wet-hopping is right up your alley, it’s just a qualitative difference that some hopheads don’t necessarily dig.   Homebrewing icon & Heretic Brewing founder Jamil Zainasheff was once asked on a podcast “How do you wet-hop without imparting the grassy flavors?”  His reply: “You don’t.”  (Thanks to Stellmacher Brewing for recently putting me in mind of this point, too)

IBUs.  The entry on “International Bitter Units” in The Oxford Companion to Beer (contributed by Matt Brynildson & Val Peacock) comes with a few caveats: “Regardless of how IBU values are derived, however, they do not provide information about the quality of the bitterness…For all its recent use in the public sphere, where it sometimes even appears in craft beer advertising, the IBU is a laboratory construct that was never meant to leave the laboratory…other hop components, roast character, carbonation, water chemistry, & residual sugar, may exert such influence as to make the IBU an entirely unreliable indicator of actual perceived bitterness.”  IBU has become the beer world’s equivalent to kilos in the weight room – a point of bragging & one-upsmanship - without much real practical use for the consumer.  It’s something everyone talks about without really understanding it, so take those stats with a grain of salt. 

The IBU threshold.  The IBU arms race came out, & brewers scrambled to have the highest figure.  A little later, the “threshold” was introduced, & it was said that human’s perception of bitterness plateaus at 100 IBUs, so it didn’t matter how crazy it was over that watermark.  A year or so it seemed to drop to 80.  Then in the past six months or so, I think I’ve heard 50 quoted a few times.  This would  equalize most hop-forward beers; I have a hard time swallowing that.  Along with reinforcing the argument above about just leaving something you don’t understand alone, the shifting threshold bugs me because it smacks of beer geeks trying to out-geek one another by showing off whatever anecdotal “knowledge” floats downstream.  “Really, we can’t perceive bitterness above 50, so…”.  Says who, & if so, so what?  That’s a whole other ball of wax for me, though.

The IPA blob.  “IPA” has become to beer marketing what “-core” was to music genres.  If something’s heavy or aggressive, slap “-core” at the end & you’ve got a new genre: emocore, slowcore, skacore, mathcore.  How about “Krishnacore”?  Same with IPA.  Any hoppy hybrid gets called an IPA: black IPA, white IPA, red IPA, session IPA, Belgian IPA, harvest IPA.  On the one hand, it’s a clear signal to the consumer that “This is a hoppy beer”.  On the other hand, after a while it loses its meaning, or is exploitable by  those wanting to ride the wave & everything becomes an IPA.  Writing in BeerAdvocate magazine, Andy Crouch asked the question “So what kind of IPA are you drinking?”.    Used to be “hoppy lager” was an adequate description, too, before “IPL” came along.

Brewers are sadists (& hopheads masochists).  This may not be so much a controversy as a cliché, & I love to bitch about clichés.  The uninitiated, & even the initiated, taste the piney, citrus pith bitterness of an IPA or double IPA & imagine that the brewers wants to rip their taste buds off.  I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve heard someone surmise that a brewer “just wants to shove as many hops in there as possible & rip your head off with bitterness”.  I don’t think that does justice to the skill & intentionality inherent in making a beer with a really assertive hop presence, without making it undrinkable (that’s a relative term, I know).  I’ve come to love aggressively hoppy beers, & it has nothing to do with wanting to inflict pain on myself.  In that big character is a subtle balancing act between challenging & gratifying, a really exquisite dance that the best IPAs have down.  Fans of spicy food like the heat it because it heightens ALL the flavors; it makes the palate stand up & notice.  It’s not just heat for heat’s sake, or bitter for bitter’s sake.  Appreciating a very bitter beer takes some acclimation, but can be so rewarding when you’re in the zone.  So don’t discredit the brewers by assume that they’re just ham-handedly squeezing hops in at all costs.

Alrighty, a few more nuggets for thought, a few more grievances shed.  One thing I feel bears repeating: I think it’s a feather in the cap of craft brewers that a style as inherently controversial & polarizing as IPA has gained such a high place in the zeitgeist.  Beer is fun, challenge is fun, so let’s all have a drink. 

Thanks to the website DC Beer for this article; it fueled a lot of the thought that went into this post.  If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you do so.