IPA - India Pale Ale

Ah, IPA. What is you, exactly? Loaded with hops? Yes, yes you are. ABV just a touch higher than average? Yup. The darling of the American craft revolution? Indeed. Consequently ubiquitous? Is you ever.

But that’s not the whole story, of course. Trouble is, when you’re the darling of  revolution (I’m copywriting that), there’s a lot of pressure on you to constantly impress, and American brewers generally try to impress by going BIGger and BIGger, tesing the limits of the style. Which expanision of style leads to a distortion of said style’s true character. To even begin to understand IPA, we have to go back to it’s roots.

HISTORY

So, where are your roots, then, IPA? Oddly enough, not in America, despite the above-written; even more oddly enough, not in India, either. The India that is the “I” in IPA refers, in fact, to the original beer’s destination.

The legend goes like this: back in the day (the day being the late-18th/early-19th century by most accounts), British brewers developed the pale ale by burning coke instead of wood to roast their barley - coke being neither the soda nor the narcotic, but the derivitive of distilled coal. The new fuel burned hotter and less chaotically than wood and produced paler malts and the paler malts produced a paler ale than any other ale at the time. These pale ales, though, weren’t suited for lengthy sea travel and Great Britain had their colony over in India. How to get them good, drinkable pale ale? Two ways: increase the hop content, which would raise the acidity level, acid being a natural preservative; reduce the sugar by way of yeast, thereby attracting fewer bacteria, but raising ABV considerbly. The result was a high hopped, high boozed beer that the British colonies enjoyed so much, they popularized the style. Now it’s named after them.

IPA TODAY

Of course, the beer the imperialist Britons sipped on would probably shock today’s geeks. The aforementioned obsession with IPAs here in the US, which led to equally obsessive expansion, has delivered us to a point where we’ve obscured the original memory of the style - which doesn’t matter anyway, because the current incarnation itself shifts constantly.

Think of it like this: you go to reorganize your living room, moving furniture here and there and everywhere, and you can’t settle on final arrangement. But you can’t stop, so your living room is in perpetual flux, has no actual design and you’ve forgotten the original. Visitors, though, will recognize all the same furniture, so… it’s still your living room.

Get that?

Like your furniture in that hypothetical living room, there’s still some basic elements you can expect from an IPA. Expect an ABV at least a bit higher than other styles. Expect a good amount of hops - most often boasting pine or citrus flavors - and so expect a bitterness, especially in the finish. Other than that, expect every IPA you have to be markedly distinct from the one before it, which makes it a very cool style still, despite our tendency to overdo it.

Tags: 101, history, IPA
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