IPA Ignorance

IPA's were originally brewed in England with the intent to travel through space and time to arrive in modern day California, via hop wormhole.

 

Certainly. As I said in an earlier post the names stay the same but the articles they describe don't.Beware of the word "traditional" which rarely means what you think whan applied to beer. IPAs actually sent to India themselves altered a lot during the 19th century.
IPAs weren't strong. Often they were the weakest beers in the brewer's portfolio.

DIPA is a new name , it doesn't mean that beers like this weren't brewed before.

A 19th century Scotch Ale ? One which when recreated caused Kristen England from the BJCP to declare "like the first ever DIPA"

 

I have nothing to bring to this party, but I would like to thank those who dig in, do research, and provide constructive insights.

 

As I mentioned they make no claim to even attempt to be historically accurate , it's notba retro brew. It's a Dipa with their twist on using tons of English malts, hops and yeast. Still makes it an English Dipa though. It's a big beer at 9%, but it's also different from most American divas too.

 

American divas typically throw their phones at you at even the mention of malt in their IPA.

 

@marquis , I don't think that your points invalidate the point made by @AlcahueteJ .

I agree that meanings change. Meanings evolve, but that doesn't mean that they are irrelevant at a specific point in time. A car of today is different from a car from 1930, but that doesn't mean that the term car or automobile didn't/doesn't mean something to the 1930's or 2015's consumer (even with the grey areas).

If someone went into a bar in the 1940s and was able to chose between Burton, bitter, or mild - then those terms existed as somewhat meaningful terms to that customer (just as AlcahueteJ is requesting). Your comment about your grandfather not recognizing a modern mild supports this. He had a reference point of comparison... something he would recognize. Of course, definitions will always have a degree of fuzziness (and overlap in the case of beer). A brewer in the 40s might play loose with any naming conventions just as a brewer today might do the same.

 

an IPA is not hoppy? what? you sound pretty confused.

 

Agreed. My post was really to illustrate that you can't tie down styles once and for all.Nobody brews anything remotely resembling an early IPA so perhaps one interpretation is as good as another.
One point , all this talk of "English" IPA - Scotland was a major brewer of IPAs too, second only to Burton.

 

Agree completely. I have said I learn something every day. Thanks guys for turning a thread that started out being snarky into a thread that teaches me more than one thing.

 

IPAs weren't particularly strong beer. A heavily hopped beer of 9% ABV would be a Stock Ale. Something like this:

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.nl/2015/12/lets-brew-wednesday-1850-truman-kxxx.html

 

DIPA isn't an English style, but there were 9% ABV beers with a ridiculous amount of hops: Stock Ales. (See above.)

 

Interesting again. Especially about Bass. Brettanomyces was isolated from a bottle of Bass Pale Ale in the 1930's. But, when those letters were written, no-one knew about Brettanomyces so quite possibly it was just assumed to be another type of yeast and not a spoiling organism.

I'm shocked at the state of Younger's IPA. That stuff was shipped all over the world. I'd have expected it to be cleaner. Though they were right tarts when it came to yeast, using the yeast from just about every brewery in Edinburgh. However, I notice that all the IPA examples in his personal brewing book used yeast from Younger's Abbey Brewery. (Their IPA was mostly brewed at their other brewery, Holyrood.)

That's a nice quote about Bass leaving their beer to mature out in the brewery yard. I was reluctant to believe it at first, it sounds so crazy. But I've found too many reliable sources that confirm it. And he's right about the high degree of attenuation That was one of the key factors in making it robust: there was nothing left for anything nasty to ferment.

He's got the fermentation temperature of Younger's IPA spot on. Pitched at 60º F rising to between 71º and 73º F. Note that it isn't a particularly cool fermentation. The Scots didn't ferment any cooler than the English.

 

Sort off-topic, but still relevant to the thread in my opinion and is a fun fact. I stumbled upon this in my reading for a speech on the history of the IPA that I'm giving. Never mind what the 19th century IPA tasted like, I want to know what the first double IPA tasted like....very interesting that this style was initially created to cover up potential flaws...

If a guy named Electric Dave hadn’t sold Cilurzo plastic fermenters, he might not have brewed the country’s first Double IPA. He was launching Blind Pig Brewing Company, and as he puts it: “We weren’t sure how the equipment would react [to the plastic], so we decided that we’d take our base IPA recipe, double the hops and bump the malt up a little bit. The hops would sort of cover up any flaws, and it would also give us some idea of how the whole brewhouse would run. It was 10 times more bitter than most Double IPAs now and lower in alcohol. There was a blistering bitterness on the palate; it was amazing how many people actually liked it back then.”

 

Ron (@patto1ro), in Patrik's previous post it is quoted: "Not without importance it is perhaps that the barrels are covered inside by a solution of double sulphurous acid although this probably only protects against oxygenation through the wood's pores."

Are you familiar with this barrel lining? I was under impression that the British brewers used absolutely no barrel linings and that the beer was in 100% contact with the wood. What do you know about this matter of barrel linings?

Cheers!

Jack

 

Wow buddy I think you are way, way off here for a number of reasons. But mainly I'll point out that many or even most styles have changed over the years, and are being broadened every year. Just because we have an American twist on a classic style doesn't mean that it's not an IPA. Same thing with Imperial stouts which have a similar history and veign- started out in Britain and has changed over the years. I'd say with both IPA and Imperial stout that these styles are far more popular and more widely brewed now than in Britain.

Further, American IPA does normally have it's own classification- check out the BJCP program guidelines which are an industry standard used to judge and classify beer. You'll see many variations on the IPA style, and both American and British styles are already classified and separated.

I note and admire your old school approach to the classification of a style you probably enjoy, but we are way past calling or considering an IPA only English by this point.

 

This post is perfectly titled.

 

This was the first beer to be called a DIPA but was by no means the first to be so brewed.Both of the following have been described , on tasting, as DIPAs
http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2011/09/lets-brew-wednesday-1868-younger-no-3.html
http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2012/02/lets-brew-wednesday-1868-william.html

 

Lining barrels was pretty rare in Britain in the 19th century. Probably did happen, though I've not seen any hard evidence for it before the early 20th century. Never heard of this before. How can you line barrels with acid?

 

Very informative discussion all around. Thanks. I keep coming back to Colonial India, and particularly The Man Who Would Be King ( Rudyard Kipling's story about adventurism into Afghanistan two centuries back). In the various interpretations of this tale on film, I really do not recall beer so much....but these characters could really have used some reminder of home. This, I think was the original intent (and For Delhi tennis clubs), but the audacity of sending beer to India by ship in the late 1800s still makes a big historical mark with me. I know for sure that the beers are all different now, but that is where the name originated. All of this should be appreciated as part of history and not endlessly debated by English or US styling of IPAs, guidelines, etc. I love all kinds of IPAs, even with grapefruit! Keeps the scurvy at bay!

 

There is no beer style of British (European) Double IPA but the recipe for 1868 Younger No. 3 is deserving of that beer style name.

Both of the homebrew recipes (courtesy of Kristen England) utilize dry hoping using Saaz hops. For 5 gallon batches:

· 1.36 oz. of Saaz dry hopping

· 2.61 oz. of Saaz dry hopping

I have homebrewed many different batches of beer using Saaz hops including using them for dry hoping. Since Saaz hops have low amounts of essential oils they are very, very different from American aroma hops (e.g., Cascade, Centennial, Citra, Simcoe, Amarillo, etc.) when used for dry hopping. In other words dry hopping with 2.61 oz. of Saaz will have a very, very different effect that dry hopping with an American aroma hop of that amount.

American Double IPAs (which is a style listed on BA) utilize American aroma hops for both generous late kettle additions and dry hoping.

I recently brewed a DIPA based upon a recipe for Pliny the Elder (an article written by Vinnie Cilurzo). For a 5 gallon batch my late/dry hop additions were:

· End of boil: 1 ounce Amarillo, 1 ounce Centennial, 1.6 ounce Simcoe (total of 3.6 ounces)

· Dry Hop: 1 ounce each of Columbus, Amarillo, Centennial, Simcoe (total of 4 ounces).

Given the hop schedule, type of hops, and quantities of hops Pliny the Elder is a very different beer from 1868 Younger No. 3.

Cheers!