The real IPAs

To rephrase your post a bit, perhaps salt (not hops) was used as a preservative in historical IPAs. That would explain quite a lot actually.

 

Great info as always, Ron.

Along the lines of OP, though, I'm interested to know if it now is even possible to brew an historically accurate IPA. When I attempted to recreate another beer I was able to purchase accurate yeast, a strain kept the same by a company still doing business, but was stymied at Brown Malt, a malt hard to get nowadays, and very much different diastatically and in flavor from the malt in recipe.

Are the modern pale malts equivalent to the ancient? Are the ancient pale ale yeasts available today accurate?

 

This is a bit of a tangent but I'm going to share it anyways. I'm planning an epic road trip this summer from Texas (hot) through New Mexico and Arizona (hotter) up to the Bay area. I am going to bring as many bottles of Jester King's Wytchmaker with me (among some other treats)--in the spirit of the "original" IPAs will my beers undergo similar extreme conditions (albeit on a much smaller scale)?

 

good catch. my bad. it was late

 

Bass sold their beer at a higher price than most other breweries. And other breweries made their Pale Ale in a similar way to Bass. It's only in the second half of the 19th century that running Pale Ales appeared - things like AK and Dinner Ale.

 

Brown malt is probably the trickiest ingredient to recreate. I don't think pale malt has changed anything like as much. I assume Bass yeast is still around.