New England IPA

I'd be interested in a visual-blind taste test between these and others with a similar flavor profile. My personal theory is that the haziness has been a result of people seeing a couple good hazy IPAs from the same region and developing a preference based on a non-causal relationship between appearance and flavor. For what it's worth, I don't personally find the murky appearance appealing at all. I like IPAs and especially DIPAs with a little haziness (gives it a sort of "raw" look - think Enjoy By) but I hate drinking Yangtze River water.

 

Just like most other beer fads, the strongest examples will stick around and the other ones will slowly die off.

 

Other than hops/ water/ yeast / malt what would possibly make NE a separate style in the ipa world? NJ does this, NC does this, as well as Ohio and Wisconsin. There's nothing new or regional about hazy IPAs some of which are unfiltered. Hop Drop and Roll from NoDa in Charlotte uses a hop blend very similar to HT. The Shape of Hops from Pa. uses a 5 hop blend that I'm sure overlap with Alchemist to some extent. It's not proprietary.

 

"Steer clear of clear beer"
-playdoh

 

But the yeast strains, hopping rates, and water profiles are quite different. The grain bills seem to favor grains that most brewers dont use for an ipa backbone as well.

 

Know how I know you've never had the New England beers that are being referenced?

 

I also want to reinforce that it is the hops water yeast and malts that make every beer different. Pretty sure its the hops, malt, yeast, and water that makes a stout different from an IPA... The question is just how different are these new IPA's...

 

Not that I am at all in favour of officially introducing a separate New England IPA category (I'm actually in favour of collapsing all [X]PA into one "Pale Ales" category), I think think this a little different than the Black / Rye IPA situation. I think this is more like the West Coast IPA - where some breweries from one part of the country approach a style slightly differently, people like it, and the approach gets picked up elsewhere.

Now what we do need is a North-West of South Brooklyn IPA category - who's with me!? (geographical correction courtesy of @TongoRad )

 

I don't think this is true. Hopworks in Portand has been using London III as their house yeast for years and they aren't the only one on the West Coast, for example. Lots of brewers out here making unfiltered IPAs with flaked grains too. Lots heavily dry-hopping with all kinds of new hops. The water issue keeps being brought up but honestly, it's all speculation with no one offering any real evidence that it is true. And water is far less influential than many make it out to be. It hardly defines any style. To think that NE style is unique is to make the mistake of thinking that the BA forums represent an accurate view of what is happening in the beer world at large, which is certainly not the case.

 

There is a lot of speculation in the homebrew forums and we have an active thread trying to figure these trillium styled IPA's out. I just brewed an IPA with londonIII and the beer was murky as hell going into bottles yesterday. The only thing that really changed between this recipe and other recipes I have done was the yeast. My dryhopping rates were a bit more than my usual IPA recipes by about 1/5oz per gallon, and was performed in two stages instead of my usual one stage. When I added the dryhops the beer actually seemed pretty clear and I am wondering if there is an interaction between the hop oils and yeast that may be unique to this yeast strain. I do think you aren't giving water the respect it deserves though.

 

I'm going to just arbitrarily bitch for a moment -- what's frustrating to me is the paucity of real, hard info on brewing differences between these "NE-style" IPAs and other IPAs (West Coast or otherwise). I understand wanting to keep proprietary info secret. I get that you have a business to run and money to make. I get that brewers probably feel a special kinship with their practices and don't want any old joe to be able to do what they do. All that said, I remember reading old brewing magazine articles where Vinnie Cilurzo basically spelled out how to make Pliny. Maybe similar disclosure will happen as this type of brewing becomes more ubiquitous. Until then, though, I find it kinda aggravating that no one will come out and say, "Look, we use this kind of yeast strain, this type of water profile, hop in this and that way, at these levels, blah, blah, blah. If you'd like to brew one like us, here's a recipe to try out." Again, I know that's naive. Again, I know few people are interested in sharing their trade secrets. But it's the secrecy, to me, that, among other things (novelty, visual-taste interactions, etc.) that has turned people into such friggin' mystics about these types of beers.

 

http://byo.com/stories/issue/itemlist/category/195-october-2013
This issue of BYO has brewing info on these beers with interviews with brewers from lawsons, HF etc...

 

With all due respect, though, the BYO article is basically the author making a bunch of educated guesses about how to brew clones, with the brewers providing occasional tip/hints. It's nice the brewers agreed to offer anything at all, to be sure. But, that was a very different level of disclosure than, say, this (from Mssr. Cilurzo) -->

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/attachments/0000/6351/doubleIPA.pdf

 

Dave (@telejunkie ), you are being 'talked' about.

Cheers!

 

Except it didn't originate in NE and have everyone else pick it up. Alpine Nelson is one example of a beer that has been around for a decade. That's just one, but there's no lack of other breweries on the West Coast that have also been doing this for 5-10+ years that came along long before the current NE craze. Maybe a beer historian can correct me if I'm wrong, but what is referred to as the West Coast style first appeared on the West coast en mass before any notable equivalents anywhere else. Pizza Port Swami's was first brewed in the early 90's. PtE, Blind Pig and such in the mid 90's. To my knowledge, those were originals and there wasn't anything out there like those at all.

I don't think West Coast should have its own style either. I just don't buy this idea that NE is doing something brand new that hasn't been seen before. The people that think that appear to primarily be East Coasters who pay incredibly little attention to the West Coast scene outside of a handful of big breweries.

 

Despite the New York tag, I'm not from the East Coast. I'm not even from America. So frankly I don't give a toss who/where came up with it first - I wasn't trying to make it a competition on that front - I was just using the term that was in the OP, that you see floating around so abundantly these days. So if Alpine or whoever "invented" this type of pale ale, then good for them and I'm sorry they don't get the recognition they deserve. Unfortunately I can't control that. My point was that "New England IPAs" (I was going by the thread title, but we can call them "California-inspired New England unfairly-recognised IPAs") are something a little different than the black/rye IPA fad in my mind.

 

I don't really care who actually came up with it first. I'm saying the whole premise that this is unique to NE and copied elsewhere is factually incorrect.

 

Every brewery out there has a different combination of yeast/hops/water. Nothing about New England IPAs differentiate them from other great American IPAs, outside of coming from the northeastern part of our country. Yes, some great IPAs come from that part of the country, but great IPAs can be found in any region of our country.

 

Got it - I didn't coin the term and I've said in other threads that I dislike it. And quite possibly it's factually incorrect (frankly I don't care - the term is ridiculous whether it is or isn't), but rightly or wrongly NE have been credited with it, and since this has become a "thing", there has been (at least from what I've seen) an upward trend in terms of demand for / brewing of beers of this nature, all over the place.

 

I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and guess you haven't sampled these beers. I'm not trying to be a dick, but to say pliny or ruin-ten are the same style of beer as Julius, and heady topper is a stretch. The hopping rates by themselves and the hop schedules are worlds apart. When was the last time you had a 40IBU beer that was hoppier than any beer you have tried before?
EDIT:
Pliny the elder is dryhopped at >3 lbs per barrel. Some of these brews from trillium and treehouse are coming in at 8lbs per bbl of hops. That by itself is uncharacteristic of their contemporaries.