Hill Farmstead (2024)

If anyone missed out on the lottery and can make the trip today it looks like it’s still available in the webshop, which is really surprising considering how quickly it sold out yesterday

 

Looks like it's gone now - missed it by 9 mins

 

The May 28th batch of Double Galaxy is way clearer than it used to be. It looks nothing like the yellow/orange haze of prior batches. Anyone else notice this?

 

I’ve had issues with HF pale ales and IPA’s going back several years. I am guessing the why is in the production. Not stopping it from gettin rave reviews on the beer socials.

 

Most of those ipas were originally a lot clearer when they were first brewed by HF. As the haze craze took over, they seemingly adjusted their recipe to the trend. Now it seems they're intentionally moving away from the haze as the public is trending more towards an equilibrium where both clear and hazy ipas are in demand. Just my guess as to what's going on.

But you can go back and look at the earliest check-ins on untappd for these beers, and the latest batches seem more in line with how they looked 10 years ago.

 

That is indeed the case.

A decade+ ago we would frequently get drops of Hill Farmstead beers (on draft) and the hoppy brands were not murky. At some point Hill Farmstead withdrew from the Philly market and these beers were no longer available to me. I would read posts on BA about how Hill Farmstead hoppy beers were hazy and I thought to myself: what the heck are those people talking about. I agree with your assertion that Hill Farmstead made a decision to change the appearance of their hoppy beers to align with the new Juicy/Hazy trend.

Are they now going back to how they brewed these beers a decade+ ago? That would be an interesting 'reversal'.

Cheers!

 

And to clarify-- I think the oldest/most recent batches would have still been called "hazy" back in 2013/2014. They're a little bit opaque, definitely not crystal clear like ipas had been for most of craft beer's history. Hazy back then really just meant "not totally clear". Similar to Heady Topper.

Now hazy means completely opaque ala Tree House beers.

 

Yes, the meaning of "hazy" has definitely 'evolved' over the past 10+ years.

Cheers!

 

If fully intentional, wouldn't they actually have explicitly said so? They're usually very transparent to the nth degree about their intents.

 

Just cracked a 6/4/24 Double Riwaka. It's orange/amber and tastes way maltier than usual. Added to this site in August 2019, the "how it was made ten years ago" argument doesn't hold up for this one in particular. Something's up with these "Double [single hop]" beers.

 

they must have forgotten to roll the keg

 

As far as I know, they never addressed changing the recipe previously (from a less opaque beer to a more opaque beer). But it obviously happened.

Another interesting note on their ipas-- they never, as far as I know, describe the ipas beyond the hops involved. No mention of New England, Hazy, West Coast, etc. The only exception being all of the ipas in their "ancestral series" (Abner, Ephraim, Harlan, Susan) are described as "American IPA"

They do refer to ipas in terms of "pale ale", "single-hop", "imperial" and "double". But beyond that there are no other reference points in the description.

So either they are intentionally adjusting the recipe so that many of their beers are less hazy than they were previously, or they have quality control issues that they have decided not to address in any way. I lean towards the former, simply because it would be unusual for them to have quality control issues for this long, across so many ipas, and to just apparently decide it's not a problem. I could see them having some slight variance and rolling with it as long as they could get it back to what they wanted. But to me this seems like an obvious adjustment in their method approach, to at least some or most of their ipas.

I have many friends that are very much done with hazy ipas, and prefer options that call back to more of a pre-2014 style. Perhaps Shaun and co. are of the same mind.

Or perhaps they're just losing their touch? Maybe someone should ask them

 

Agreed, I think someone needs to ask them directly.

Personally I love that some breweries have been returning to the crisp and more assertive West Coast clarity the past couple years, and few quite commendably (shoutout to Fat Head's for never not holding that line in my region, though). However, it seems that some of these IPAs at Hill are in a kind of middle ground that don't quite grasp their own former magic, nor the magic of the opposing profile. I get that many consumers are worn out on NEIPA--personally it's not even something I was ever heavily invested in--but a very well done example can be a thing of beauty, and some of those I've had from Hill, in the late 2010s particularly, were in that realm. And I still think of Hill as the progenitor, picking up where Alchemist threw down, and really going the extra mile making it its own style, though I know others view it slightly differently.

@grassrootsVT any thoughts on the ever shifting perceptions of the Hill IPA?

 

I don't have the benefit of years of history with HF like some of you all do, but I had Edward and What is Enlightenment on tap at Armsby recently and I can report that both of them were quite hazy and incredibly delicious.

 

I can vouch the opposite of Edward, in terms of its deliciousness. Could just be my tastebuds, but the last batch I had, poured at Moe's Tavern in Lee, MA, was pretty terrible. Really vegetal and not in a way that was at all pleasant. That and a couple other HF IPA / Pale Ale interactions in the last couple of years have really turned me off of their beers.

 

Man, that's a shame to hear. The keg that's on at Armsby now is on point, at least. Had that candied orange and pine combo that I can't get enough of in a hoppy beer.