Do cloudy/hoppy/turbid IPAs scale up?

I think there's a reason Hill Farmstead doesn't/won't bottle their hoppy beers. Once a beer hits a larger distro it's harder to control temperature/storage/length of time on shelf. The NE IPA's are too delicate to be enjoyed even after a week or 2 from packaging. It's kind of like a sick joke. The only brewery that I haven't seen this issue with is Trillium and that's because I'm assuming they hop the ever-loving Jesus out of them.

 

I really question whether this is the case. I have my doubts that you couldn't scale up a hoppy beer but maybe it is more the case that some larger breweries simply make differing decisions concerning their production beer.

@Peter_Wolfe would be the best person to address this topic since he is expert on both the topics of hops (dry hopping) and large scale brewing production.

Cheers!

 

I think a lot of what we taste with these small distro new england ipas is freshness more than haziness. They dry hop the crap out of their beers and its in ur mouth 2 weeks later. If treehouse or trillium did everything exactly the same and distributed nationally it wouldn't taste the same. Sculpin is still awesome when i get it, but i don't imagine its the same as getting it in cali

 

I've recently had the chance to try Duet on draft at a local place, was happy to see it's finally made it out here. It was good but didn't meet the expectation I had from all the reviews and what not I have heard. Also $10/pint which I thought was absurd.

 

Dry hops pretty much scale linear. It's not an issue of not being able to do it on a large scale. You actually get more hop efficiency the larger the batch is because of surface area and settling time in a tank or kettle.

The real issue is cost. Any brewery will not be able to make a beer with 6 pounds of hops per barrel and then make a profit off of sending it to a distributor to go in the shelf for $10 a six-pack. If you are selling growlers of pints over the bar, you can still make enough profit off of expensive beer like that. And then you typically stabilize a beer for a longer shelf life if you are distributing. Most hoppy IPAs from larger breweries would taste a lot more like the cloudy stuff from the small guys if it was kegged without any clarification or stabilization and drunk in less than a week. It's a tradeoff. You take an initial hit for longer stability at a lower level of hop intensity.

 

Kinda what I was thinking. Had Trillium stuff fresh, mind blown. Flew home with some of the same bottles, less impressed 7-10 days later. Still cloudy/hazy, but the flavor profile and aroma were far less potent. My $0.02

 

TG has said so, and it's on the bottles. It's possible that they're lying, but I don't see much point in doing so.

 

Late to the party, but I think @bulletrain76 hit on my thinking, combined with quoted post, based on nothing but personal experience - illustrated perfectly by one instance: Dirt Wilf at Victory was a hugely, powerfully hoppy beer the one time I visited the brewery. Well beyond any offering of the same beer I've had in any bottle, fresh or not.

That's also why I take a local rave review with a grain of salt - not because the poster is lying or exaggerating (though possible), but because s/he is having a different experience having the same beer on tap at brewery compare to me in bottle, likely with extra age.

I (finally) have a local brewery starting to make some nice IPAs (though not cloudy), but even I wonder how well they would capitalize on their beers if/when they start packaging.

 

Also an n = 1 experience, but I'll echo your sentiments. It's been awhile, but in years past when I've had Trillium's Fort Point Pale Ale on draft at local bars, I thought it was a very good pale ale.

I had their Galaxy double dry hopped Fort Point Pale Ale in the bottle directly from the brewery, and then just last month the regular Fort Point Pale from a growler. Both those experiences were cloudy turbid beers (the former draft samples I mentioned were much clearer) and they were outstanding pale ales.

Growler/draft only IPAs being at the top of the rankings here on Beeradvocate is nothing new. Back when I first joined over ten years ago, Malsama Mama was the number one IPA, and it was growler only. Pliny the Younger (draft only, sells out in one day) was the number one beer on this site, period, for a number of years.

This is why I don't like comparing hop forward beers from large scale breweries like Sierra Nevada to your local brewery that's "killing it" with hoppy beers.

 

Not perfectly linear, but close enough for this discussion. Hop utilization (and efficiency in general) is better at the larger scale. Beersmith is used by both home and commercial breweries, and they maintain hop utilization can be anywhere from 100% to 125% (or even 150%) for large-scale multi-barrel systems compared to small test recipes. Grain efficiency can be 1-5% greater.
In any case, it is more efficient for large-scale brewing, so saying it is too expensive to scale up uber-hopped brews doesn't make sense. The only two cases where this could possibly make sense is if the small-scale brewer was only selling on site (pocketing the expenses that would go into distributors' and middlemen's pockets for large scale brewing) or if the large-scale brewer wanted to sell the product for less than it was previously sold (squeezing profit margins).

 

This pathological fascination with "New England" or "Vermont" style beers is grating

 

I bought bottles in Iowa so I think the shipping problem might already be tackled! I did buy from a store that had kept the beer cold and have seen it stored warm elsewhere though, which might be less good.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if you extract different character from dry hops under high pressure in a very large conical vs. lower pressure in a smaller fermentor. Yeast definitely behaves differently from one to the other. It is also nearly impossible to replicate boil and cooling conditions with different sets of equipment.

 

I think if you're catching it fresh you won't see as much of an issue, but you're right about the shop keeping it warm. It's going to be the places with less than idea storage conditions that the issues will be most prominent.

 

You never have to invest in a centrifuge, and it gives the cellar person less work to do?

 

I love threads where I learn something. This is awesome. And it makes me thirsty.

 

I doubt that the answer is simple. It is likely a combination of freshness, dry hop scaling, transport/heat deterioration, and simply crafting a beer differently when it is designed for growler fills vs. longer term shelf life.

I like what @cjgiant said, I am skeptical that homerism is simply bias rather than an honest reflection of how much better those beers are at the source. All the Pisner fans say this is true, and I don't see why it wouldn't be even more so for these very light malt base dry-hopped IPAs. Beer is perishable. When you get beers like this in a trade, they still aren't the same as they are when consumed locally. I don't think it is a coincidence that beers brewed from the outset for wide distro will likely not reflect much regional variation in rankings. I know I never bump ratings for "rarity", in fact, I'd hold "rare" beers to a higher standard if anything.

 

You can scale anything up. You might have to tweak recipes to adjust for higher/lower efficiency, but really you can scale anything up.

The tricky part is there's a magic threshold where you stop being able to use humans for certain tasks. It's very common when dry hopping in a small brewery to dump pellets into the top of the fermentor, but after a certain tank size that becomes impractical and dangerous (impractical because you'd spend 8 hours cutting open the boxes and foil bags, and dangerous because the CO2 could kill the brewer). In essence, there's a "soft cap" on the size because most small brewers don't have the capital to install automated dry hopping systems.