Is Brut IPA a new beer style?

I don't really know or care if they're a style, but I'd sure like to try some.

 

Being born and raised in San Francisco, I've tried 3 so far.

Cellarmaker Less than Zero
Temescal / Cellarmaker / Social Three Cheers!
Seven Stills Caviar Dreams

Loved them all, but they taste very different from IPAs. They are supposedly hopped heavily, but it doesn't come through on the taste as much as you'd think. Not necessarily a bad thing, though. It's really crisp and pleasant, as the new substyle is aiming for. Just know that they're not exciting beers, but (because of that?) they're so very drinkable.

 

I've had 3 or 4 so far and haven't been particularly impressed by any of them. They've all seemed rather bland. We already have a style for more drinkable and less bitter IPAs--they're called pale ales.

 

So it's basically an IPA with virtually no residual sugars? That sounds very much like 19th-century Bass:

OG 1065.63
FG 1003.34
ABV 8.06
Apparent Attenuation 94.59%

Except made using the shortcut of enzymes rather than ageing.

 

IPA has appeared in many guises over the last couple of centuries But it began life as a barrel aged heavily hopped beer fermented to dryness (not to mention the subsequent action ofBrettanomyces)

 

More, or less. The hops are used for flavor and aroma, and very little bitterness is desired. Like the namesake, it's highly carbonated, and goes into that realm of flavors. Very warm weather friendly drinking. If the starting gravity can come down a bit, that is.

 

Sure, I'd try it. But given that there are an infinite number of beer variations, I propose that each shouldn't be a new style. It's an IPA. The brewer is free to call it what they want without having a new style.

 

Would you equate what your calling a light IPA to a session IPA? I don't know off hand what the calorie count is on session brews, but I find the lack of malt to be a problem. I can't drink stuff like Founders All Day, and I think most session IPAs to be generally terrible. I assumed when I see Brut I'm thinking dry, so I'm thinking they reduced the malt to make it less sweet. I've never seen a Brut IPA here, but I haven't been looking. So Brut= another name for session?

 

Brut IPAs taste nothing like Session IPAs. I generally think SIPAs taste like hop water literally, but Brut IPAs have more in common with a hoppy Pils in tasting notes (IMO).

 

My experience with exciting!!! beers is that they tend to go from great to sucky at record speeds (8 oz or so). I can deal with a little less excitement these days.

 

Both of the Brut IPAs I've had were higher in alcohol 7.5% plus. I thought they were both pretty interesting, but it's nothing to special. They body is incredibly thin, and the hops actually burned a bit on both, probably due to their being little residual sugar to balance them out.

 

Session IPAs are generally around 5% abv or lower. All of the Brut IPAs I've seen so far are higher than that, around 7% like a normal IPA.

The dryness comes from use of the enzyme, here's a little bit from Drake's Brewing Co. website: "Per Kim’s advice, we added amylase enzymes to the fermenter. It’s the key ingredient during Extra Brut IPA production, which reduced all the malt sugar to yeast food. We were rewarded with an absolutely arid beer, that fermented down into negative plato numbers (by density, since alcohol is lighter than water, you can achieve negative sugar concentrations)."

 

I can see it all happening now, lawn chairs being folded up and laptops gathered in from all of the line standing at all the top NEIPA and pastry stout special releases around the country, and a new pilgrimage of neckbeards out to San Francisco to capture the hippest new Brut IPA before the masses catch onto the style and make it "uncool". Will be like 1960's Haight/Asbury flood of hippies all over again, but mostly guys with pudgy beer bellies this time around.

 

As far as the style goes, it sounds interesting and I'm excited for innovation, but I'm sure there will be some great Brut IPAs, average ones and crappola ones, just like all other styles.

 

Waiting for new puns...

Brut Force IPA

 

That is a dry-hopped Lambic, not an IPA. Dry hopping any beer does not make it an IPA. There are even some (not many) stouts that are dry-hopped and some have as much as 100 IBU. Those are not IPAs.

 

I'm pretty bullish on Brut IPAs at the moment. I've had a bunch of them now, and we're currently working on three new Brut IPAs at once. The latest one we did actually finished negative 0 Plato. Crazy.

Lately, I've been really introspective about what beers mean... (by that, I mean, what is ultimately the reason that style X is so attractive to folks... what about the beer specifically.) And I've been thinking a lot about the NE IPA and vis-a-vie Brut IPA.

What I find so interesting about NE IPAs is that they incorporate:

• Look (haze, bro)
• Approachability (low, soft bitterness)
• Flavor (The intense sweet impressions of fruit-forward hops)
• Feel (soft and round mouthfeel)

All of these things add-up to a really appealing beer with a great point of differentiation. Of these factors, one of the things that interests me the most is the feel aspect.

Brut IPAs -- due to their dryness and high levels of carbonation -- add to the overall impression of the beers on the palate. The mouthfeel is different.

Additionally, they feature the soft low bitterness levels, and the high hop aroma and flavors, like the NE IPA, but unlike the NE beers, the flavor is so dry that it begs for another sip, and another, and another… If I’m drinking multiple beers in a sitting, I actually prefer drinking Brut IPAs over NE IPAs due to the ultra-dry feel.

There’s a place for both IMO, but after a year or more with the omni-presence of haze, it’s refreshing (literally) to see the pendulum swinging back in the other direction and encouraging to see the lessons learned. As American craft beer matures, it makes me happy to see brewers widening the toolkit of what flavor is by incorporating a multi-sensory experience into their beer.

 

You can't have negative sugar, just like you can't have negative matter.
SINCE ethanol is only 70% as dense as water, this offsets what little residual sugar remains in the solution.
There's also "apparent attenuation" vs actual attenuation, because of the density disparity between water and ethanol.
Many wines ferment under SG 1.000, my cabernet finished at 0.994. (and there is still some residual sugar in it).

 

I've had two Brut IPAs that I can remember, and maybe one more but I'd have to check my notes. The first one I tried reminded me of a Belgo-IPA, floral/fruity esters. The second didn't do much of anything for me--it had the drying finish, but wasn't particularly effervescent, hoppy, or (as I had been expecting) floral. Granted, my sample size is small so far but I'm not picking up on what makes this style so exciting.