posted on 30 May 2009 by dan
Yeah, I know IPAs not an American original or anything, but still. The stateside brewers pretty much hijacked the style, for better or worse, by sheer force of will. We sure do loves our beers BIG here, and the style’s perfectly suited to BIGness, what with its natural hoppiness that we can just tweak and tweak to get even BIGger. It’s at the point now where foreign markets are brewing IPAs just to expand their US market.
For instance, Belgium. A country steeped in the brew tradition, the Belgian tastes run towards the subtler end of the spectrum. The IPAs we call fascinating, they might call over-hopped. But a few breweries over there have been experimenting with the style, largely for export - the Belgians won’t have it.
So dig this Gaspar, a Belgian IPA offering. It claims to be the hoppiest beer in Belgium, which is a loaded statement if there ever was one. I checked out the reviews on Beer Advocate, just to get a sense of what people thought about it. And it’s funny. The collective BA impression is that somebody must be lying to them somewhere along the line, what with the beer not being as bitter as the IPAs they’ve come to know and love.
Here’s the thing, though: this is a hoppy beer, no doubt about it. But the hops here aren’t the same American hops found in the US. These are Belgian hops, more citrus-y then flat out bitter. If you go into this beer knowing that, you maybe won’t set unrealistic expectations for it. You can sit back and just enjoy it on its own merit, rather than comparing it unfairly to something American.
And it’s easy to enjoy it, that bit taken care of. It bites your tongue with those citrus hops teeth, but it’s all wrapped in this coat of lingering sweetness. Most of the real bitterness comes at the finish, rebounding back over all that sweetness, so even after you’ve swallowed it, your tongue is teased with this rotation of alternating flavors. Very cool.
If you can get it out of your head that all IPAs are created with the same intentions, you’ll dig this beer. You’ll dig it for what it is, not for what you want it to be.
dJp
Tags: beer, Belgian, Belgium, IPA
Category: Beer Reviews, The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
posted on 4 May 2009 by dan
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
Category: 101 | Comments (0)
