For the styles it usually applies to, what happened to brilliant clarity in the last 10 or so years?!? Was it the onslaught of hazy ipa factories that convinced everyone that beers don’t need to be filtered or cold crashed or properly lagered? Went to a brewery over the weekend that was celebrating Oktoberfest. Ordered a Vienna lager and a Kolsch. The Vienna was borderline murky and the Kolsch looked like a hazy session ipa. I can forgive a little chill haze but when I can’t see through the glass of your “traditional” German lager, I feel like that’s just lazy on the brewer’s behalf. Anyone else notice this and does it bother you?
I have no data to back this up, but it could be a case of haze/murk gradually becoming a desirable quality in the minds of enough consumers that it has shifted the general perception of what a “good” beer should look like. If so, that would be a shame. I’ve never gotten around to appreciating the appearance of NEIPAs and would deeply regret if that trend was now bleeding into other styles too.
Thank you! Yes, it’s annoying as hell. I assume it has to do with brewers saving a step on filtration and/or time and liquid with not waiting for things to settle. Corner cutting to save money over quality, IMO.
Dovetail out of Chicago is guilty of this. They supposedly specialize in lager but, when my buddy brought a bunch back from his Chitown trip, half of them were hazy and we were all scratching our heads. They mostly tasted OK, but it's like why do that? Bingo. With all revolutionary trends, there will be some misguided attempts, but I trust that things will sort themselves out.
Or, perhaps equally as likely, hazy will just become the new normal with many styles for a few decades, and then some “revolutionary” brewery will start making transparent beers, the trend will pick up steam, and eventually countless beers will be marketed with the “clear” moniker just as we now see it being done with “hazy.” I should note that all of this might be more of a regional phenomenon—hazy IPAs never seem to have taken over on the West Coast to quite the degree they have elsewhere, so I’m not all that concerned that this trend is as pervasive as it might appear.
There is "hazy" as in the level in a NEIPA, and then there is "unfiltered". To me, filtration removes much of the goodness and character of a brew. If you want clear brews, lean into macro brews.
Filtering beer can indeed impact the beer's flavor and mouthfeel. FWIW I generally have a preference for unfiltered beer for that reason. And German beers such as Helles, German Pilsner,...Those beers are typically filtered since a brilliant appearance is part of those beer styles. Cheers!
Hazies are still far too common. While I can go out and find all sorts of WC IPA’s any time I shop for beer, I can’t help but notice the ever increasing multitude of haze taking up precious shelf space. For full disclosure, I do enjoy drinking a well made hazy. Unfortunately “well made hazy” is somewhat of an oxymoron. I’ve consumed hazies from top brewers like Deschutes and Russian River only for those beers to fall short of my expectations. Seems like there plenty of decent hazies, but very few great ones.
Throw me in the I want a crystal clear beer camp, and unless it is stated as nonfiltered pils, helles, etc. it will not breach the 4 in appearance no matter how heady its head retention is I'm not gonna throw stones at the hazy movement and trash IPAs but instead attribute it to the fact that there are way more smaller breweries with less equipment, centrifuges, filtration set ups, etc. when we used to have mostly larger established bigger regional breweries. When a local place by me scaled up from their small original brewery to their production brewery' 3 or so years ago now, there was a remarkable improvement in their beer clarity. I'm gonna guess it was combination of factors but I'm sure their new "toys" the invested in aided in this. ----------------------- I never pour the full can at once and usually pour 2-3 times to finish a can and freshen my glass. I get a nice pretty beer those first 2 pours thanks to that settled sediment being at the bottom, not until final pour does it get cloudy. Nice little solution that allows me to drink with my eyes first and enjoy a crystal clear beer
I did an informal study maybe 2–3 years back where I analyzed the real-time inventory of Belmont Station, a well known beer store in Portland, to see the relative preponderance of “standard” IPAs vs. hazy/New England IPAs. I forget the exact breakdown but hazies were still easily in the minority. I want to say it was somewhere in the 65:35 range. And hazies seem to have only waned further since then around here, though they do still take up a lot of shelf space and tap handles. If they were all somehow unique or interesting maybe I’d get it, but most of them in my experience have been pretty similar. As for hazies produced by Deschutes, RR etc. my guess is maybe they’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon for fear of missing out/losing business but maybe their hearts aren’t really in it. They can certainly make perfectly good WCIPAs so maybe that’s what they should continue to focus on.
How would you compare the flavor/mouthfeel of the prior hazier versions with the later clear versions? If you could disregard visual bias (I know this is not east to do), did you prefer the more complex/flavorful versions? Cheers!
I've always thought that the clearest beer possible is always the best option. That's not to say that some beer shouldn't be hazy, but it is to say that beer flavor and aroma only suffers from unnecessary haze, especially from yeast in suspension.
Na. Absolutely LOVE a weissbier. Not really a fan of pouring the yeast sediment into the beer from the bottle/can, but love the style itself. Like I said, just never been a fan of unnecessarily hazy/cloudy beers and especially of people thinking that somehow overly cloudy beer is better than clear beer. Just a load of bollocks, that. Make sure your yeast finishes a healthy fermentation and drops out of solution to its liking. Most beers don't even need a cold crash or filtration. They just need time.
I don't think I could accurately answer that one, I love their beers just as much now as I ever did. I do think some of their beers are much more dialed in and cleaner than they used to be, how much of that has to do with clarity I couldn't say.
On the other hand, unintentionally unfiltered beer can lead to muddled flavors with yeast, proteins and hop compounds still in suspension.
A lot of brewers label hazies as regular IPAs, Double IPAs, Imperial IPAs, etc. with no indication that beer is actually a hazy or NE style brew. For example, Deschutes Royal Fresh is simply labeled as an Imperial IPA even though it’s definitely a hazy Impy. Thankfully most brewers will still call a spade a spade and label their hazies appropriately, but I am seeing an uptick in this deceptive marketing.
True. But I don’t know to what degree reputable bottle shops take the word of breweries at face value or modify the style listing based on what’s in the container and/or their own classification system. It probably varies quite a bit from store to store. Belmont Station has pretty limited categories for IPAs on their inventory, and several of these could overlap. This might not be an exhaustive list but it provides an example of how they list the IPAs they have in stock: Ale - IPA Ale - IPA - US Ale - IPA - Hazy Ale - IPA - Fresh Hop Ale - IPA - Seasonal Ale - IPA - Imperial Ale - IPA - Double Ale - IPA - Triple I mean, what’s the difference between an imperial IPA and a double IPA? Obviously, all fresh hop IPAs are seasonal. And if you have a hazy triple IPA, under which category do you classify it? But just anecdotally, and based on what others have said on here, I think hazies are less common here in the PNW and in California than they are in, say, New York or Massachusetts. Certainly not rare by any stretch but just not quite as ubiquitous as they seem to be elsewhere. This has generally also been borne out by recent trips I’ve taken to the East Coast, where true WCIPAs seem to be a rarity, or at least not as common as NEIPAs. So my guess is, beer drinkers in these areas are probably also less conditioned to accept other styles that are hazy if they aren’t traditionally supposed to be.
I feel like we're seeing a lot of cross-pollinating between hazy and bright IPAs. Hazy IPA's that might look like Tree House but they taste like Alpine and vice versa. There's a difference in mouthfeel, but I'd put it a pretty distant 3rd behind smell and taste on my list of characteristics that affect my opinion of a beer. It kinda sucks to get weed and onions when you were hoping for an orange pop. It's just as bad to get super soft apricots and 0 bitterness when the IPA is as bright as a helles and called "west coast" too. That makes labeling tough. Does the look/mouthfeel matter that much? I think it usually comes down to expectations. That's where things get tricky because most craft beer styles are pretty new in the grand scheme of things. We're talking 1970's for even the earliest ones. A pretty big chunk are way newer than that. I look at those a little different than I do something like a pils. But then again, we have pils offshoots that popped up in the last few years, too. Should I really care if an offshoot someone supposedly invented in 2013 isn't bright when the BA top 50 is laden with styles that didn't exist a couple decades ago and many of them aren't filtered or bright either? Frankly, I have no idea. I think I just no longer know what to expect from beer in general.
