American IPA: Finders, Keepers

It was Otto, the boorish American thief in A Fish Called Wanda, who proclaimed, “I love robbing the English. They’re so polite.” Can there be any other explanation for the absence of a single word of complaint from across the pond, more than 20 years after America’s craft brewers swiped the Brits’ beloved India Pale Ale?

Here is one of the world’s classic beer styles, a historic brewing achievement developed more than two centuries ago, a triumphant affirmation of the expanse and greatness of the British Empire. Raise a pint of IPA, and you can just feel the glory of the Union Jack, racing around Cape Horn with a cargo of wooden casks filled with pale ale made hoppier and with higher alcohol content to survive the brutal voyage to Bombay. And now it has been hijacked by the colonies.

OK, “swiped” and “hijacked” may be needless pejoratives, inhabiting similar depths in the psyche as the phrase “plagiarism.” In more civilized circles, such as writers and brewers, these are acts of “inspiration” or “homage” to the successes of their colleagues.

Yet, that hardly describes what the Americans have done with IPA. Compare a glass of Bass Ale, one of the originals, to Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. The British version tickles you with a light floral aroma and not much else. The Delaware Destroyer wallops you in the face with a grapefruit, like Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy.

An unfair comparison perhaps, but overall today’s American IPA is a thoroughly different ale from its forebears. It is hoppier, has more aroma, more alcohol and more flavor.

You might even say it’s better. And even if you won’t, Michael Jackson, the late British beer critic, certainly has. A few years back he complained, “Should I desire a true India Pale Ale, the style’s country of origin, England, would have a hard time delivering; the American examples are far more assertive.” We own the Brits, dude. Or maybe not.

Lately, I’ve been hearing rumbles in some circles that IPAs and other American ales are too much. They praise outstanding British IPAs from Meantime, Samuel Smith’s and Timothy Taylor, and scoff at American offerings that hit you over the head with a bale of Chinook and a waft of alcohol. A proper IPA, they cluck, should be softer, rounder and, by all means, it should be cask conditioned. IPAs should be more like the British: subtle and… polite. Rubbish.

This ignores one of the signature features of American microbrewing: the celebration of hops. A good IPA in particular, says Brian O’Reilly, the brewer at Sly Fox in Royersford, Pa., “lets you understand the role of hops.” Indeed, for the third year, his brewery’s IPA Project has produced a string of single-hop IPAs, allowing patrons to savor the difference between Cascade or Simcoe or even Target from Great Britain.

“We’ve totally redefined the India Pale Ale in America,” O’Reilly said. “It’s a very extreme beer the way it’s made now.”

Extreme, however, is not the same as Otto’s boorishness; there’s no reason Americans can’t be polite, too. So thanks for the IPA, Great Britain—what else ya got? ■