1800's IPA

yes

Zebulon makes a fucking great one.
I've had the Original IPA Circa 1840 and that shits on any IPA i have ever had.
"
Original IPA circa 1840 (for Laika) 7.5%. This is one of only a few beers that we repeat every year and it’s one of our most intense and challenging beers.
Brewed with 100% Maris Otter malt and a huge amounts of East Kent Goldings hops (160 calculated ibus). Fermented with Burton yeast then aged in oak barrels for 14 months with Brettanomyces. Dry hopped with more EKG and bottle conditioned.
Big gingerbread/sandalwood funk in the nose blends with dried apricot notes from the hops. The flavor is wild, hop resins and funk. Absolutely nothing like a modern IPA but it has gained a bit of a cult following over the years."

They also released a limited box that went thru the history of IPA

https://zebulonbrewing.com/blog/uncategorized/evolution-of-ipa-1840-2000-box-set/

 

I need this beer.

Enjoy

 

The OGS, my neighborhood tasting group, had an executive committee tasting back in August 2021. It was interesting to see the impact of taxation and war time supply limitations on beer recipes. But in the end, there was always beer...
Cheers!
Tom

 

Love this brewery so much.

 

One of the cooler beers I’ve ever had, from Carton Brewing - Inside Our DNA

A tribute to the first American IPA…

From several years back now and I don’t know if they’ve brewed it since. If they did, I’d buy in in a heartbeat.

Short video with more info on beer…basically speaks to your opening post.

 

The Robert Smith Ale Brewery here in Philly was brewing IPAs in the late 19th century, as indicated by this ad. Wouldn't you love to know what it tasted like?

https://brookstonbeerbulletin.com/beer-in-ads-1644-the-robert-smith-ale-brewing-co/

 

Some folks dispute that, of course, or at least note that there is no concrete proof of it and neither P. Ballantine & Sons or the Falstaff Brewing Corp. ever made the claim.
https://sites.google.com/site/pballantineandsons/home/pre-pro-us-ipas

Yeah, the beer "style" called (Old) Musty - or maybe it should be termed a "beer drink" - seems to date back to the 1850s in the US, and to have been particularly popular in the Boston area and, later, PA.

Pittsburgh Brewing Co. made one that they compared to a "Brown October Ale" (< another forgotten US ale style).

A newspaper description (so, not an industry source, etc) in 1890s called it "A ripe, smooth ale, with a fair amount of alcoholic strength, and nothing to suggest mustiness."

Many sources suggest it was initially a mixed beer like a "Half and Half" using old stock ales, or, in other cases, an old ale and lager, and so some appear to have been mixed by the tavern and thus no brand name is mentioned. In N.E. the big brands were Van Nostrand's and Parks.

 

the (sadly) defunct Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project used to put out occasional releases of historical beer recipes in their "Once Upon a Time" series. I had several of them, they were pretty good.

They did an 1879 East India Pale Ale
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/18371/88216/

 

Take it up with Augie, I'm just the messenger

Did you try it? It was a very unique and neat beer, I did age one too for about a year and it had the prettiest color, I carefully poured and ended up with beautiful clarity.

 

Oh, he and I did discuss it before the release (I looked in my emails accounts, but guess it was here on BA as a "Conversation" so it's gone now and I don't want to paraphrase what my faulty memory might remember as his comments).

Yeah, I bought a few (gave some to my old Ballantine Ale buddies scattered around the country), still have one left. I'm dubious about comparing the classic "Aged in the Wood One Year" of the post-Pro BIPA to aging it in an plastic-lined aluminum can - should snap that can open soon.


Without any specific evidence, I also think that the pre-Pro and post-Repeal Ballantine India Pale Ale were probably totally different beers. The brewery was sold to new owners at the end of Prohibition and they and their newly hired Burton-trained brewmaster created a new flagship beer, Ballantine XXX Ale. I just can't imagine that they simply re-brewed the pre-Pro India Pale Ale recipe.

 

Hopefully Von C Brewing will get around to making a reconstruction of this beer.

They did recently brew a reconstruction of Prior Pilsner (circa 1940).

Cheers!

 

To add to this, there's the statement: "fermented with Newark’s yeast, stolen back from the West Coast." I realize Carton wouldn't want complexities to get in the way of a fun story angle (that's not a knock). I always had the impression that the realities of the "Chico yeast" story are tricky to unravel (and Carton defaults to the expression "legend has it" in the video). I think the last theory I saw was that the Chico yeast actually descended from the yeast that Ballantine used for their lager beer... not their ales. I obviously don't know the full picture realities of this.

 

Granted it is just a couple of google searches but found the following on top hits...

Most of the other ones I found also referenced ballantine IPA specifically too, I just searched "chico yeast origin", so it wasn't looking for IPA in my search.

To add, I've always thought Carton does a pretty good job at story telling, and explaining the thought process behind their beers, I usually find it interesting.

 

Yeah, there's plenty of stuff like that on the web... but separating the history from the "legend," the copy/paste writing, the faulty memories, and the half-truths is the stuff of yeast detectives who are interested in doing such. I mentioned that some theorize that the source of this yeast was used by Ballantine for their lagers. People interested in craft beer today (other than a small club including @jesskidden ) basically don't even think of Ballantine as a lager brewer. Did they actually "give" this strain to Grossman and Camusi (that person being another element left out of most beer stories), or did the yeast directly come from a yeast bank instead (Siebel?). It's possible that Sierra was given the yeast used for Ballantine ales... but it also seems possible that this is an oft-repeated debasement of the details that works really well as a very compact story. I'm definitely not bright enough to separate fact from fiction, but I can see how we can build a story over time.

 

Ah, the old 'mystery' of the Chico yeast story. Below is something I posted a year+ ago on this topic:

At HomebrewCon 2018 Ken Grossman gave a presentation about his 50 years of brewing experience. On page no. 19 he presented a photograph of his handwritten recipe for what he labeled as Pale Ale #1 6/25. On that sheet he lists: "yeast BRY 167". I am personally unfamiliar with a yeast strain of BRY 167 but I am aware of yeast strain BRY 97 which is one of the Ballantine yeast strains. There are two strains of yeast attributed to Ballantine that is available from the Siebel yeast bank: BRY 96 and BRY 97. One of these strains was used to ferment Ballantine Ale while the second was used to ferment Ballantine Beer.

I have read varying accounts of which strain is which. For example some folks suggest that BRY 96 is the Ballantine Beer yeast strain and is the Sierra Nevada house strain and BRY 97 is the Ballantine Ale yeast strain and is the house strain for Anchor brewing. Whether this previous sentence represents fact?

It would seem closer to Ken writing down BRY 167 in his notes while meaning to write BRY 97?

Boy, really do not know what's what here.

I think it is safe to say that Ken Grossman obtained yeast from a yeast bank since he lists the acronym of BRY on his recipe sheet (BRY = Siebel nomenclature?). It is common lore that the original source of the yeast that Ken used in brewing his original Pale Ales was originally from Ballantine. I suppose this equates to fact? Which specific Ballantine yeast he used is still an area of confusion for me. How this 'translates' to a specific yeast strain from yeast vendors like Wyeast, White Labs, Fermentis,... is also still an area of confusion for me.

I am 100% confident that somebody(s) at Sierra Nevada knows exactly what's what here but I suppose they like to keep folks like you and me in suspense?

An interesting related story to the aspect of the Sierra Nevada yeast strain is that Ken had some difficulties in brewing his first batches of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He had to dump his first 13 batches and that that time he had very limited resources so these 'bad' batches caused great financial and emotional strain. As I remember his speech he reached out to industry folks (former brewer(s) at Ballantine?) and he was educated that this particular yeast strain had a requirement for lots of oxygen being introduced into the wort prior to pitching the yeast in order to have a healthy fermentation. With this knowledge in hand he oxygenated his next batch (batch #14?) and great joy and success was the result. Take this information with a grain of salt since it is my memory of his verbiage from June 2018.

Cheers!

Edit: There is also the complication that yeast strains will 'evolve' over multiple generations of brewing (i.e., being reused over a number of batches). Does Sierra Nevada have in storage an 'original' strain that they periodically go back to when brewing their beers like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale? How closely does that 'original' yeast strain match the 'original' strain that a given yeast vendor (Wyeast, White Labs, Fermentis,...) uses to produce their products?

 

Yeah, I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole (too many dead ends, and it's hard to turn around in them things). For me, it just never seemed particularly interesting - no one makes a big deal about using the "same malt" or the same "varieties of hops" (or even the same "corn syrup" ) and there's so much more to a beer than just its list of ingredients, especially those brewed 50 years or more apart. And individual strains of yeasts mutate and brewers buy and sell their yeast all the time (well, they did back in that era).

Yeah, I think that was his attitude when I answered a bunch of his questions about BIPA.

The P. Ballantine & Sons brewery in Newark shutdown in 1973... I don't think Grossman would have even been of legal age then.

"1890"? That reads like they're basing that on the old Falstaff label - which was a reference to when the Narragansett brewery in RI where they were brewing Ballantine India Pale Ale was founded.