Justin’s Brew Review has posted the roundup for The Session #77: Why IPA is a Big Deal. That 32 bloggers found time to write provides a bit of commentary unto itself.
Justin provides a summary, although (as always) reading the full post (and clicking a few links) is recommended:
1. HOPS! for the taste/flavor
2. Different than mass-produced “macro” beer
3. Hype/abundance of supply
(eom) except for a link, of course:
Remember last January when First We Feast posted a list of The 20 Most Influential Beers of All Time, inspiring Martyn Cornell, Mr. Zythophile, to counter with The REAL 20 most influential beers of all time?
More than 200 comments followed, and way toward the end somebody suggested, “Perhaps Martyn could start another list of the 20 most influential people!”
And he answered, “I am indeed considering that very thing.”
Every day I get up thinking, “Today will be the day.” Then I check Zythophile. I have learned to live with heartbreak.
Then today, while I was researching a pretty much unrelated story I bumped into the 1999 issue of American Brewer in which Greg Kitsock assembled such a list. “A Brew’s Who Of The Millennium: 25 Of The Most Significant Figures In Brewing Over The Last 1,000 Years” actually includes more than 50 names. He ended up with two lists of 25 (and in some cases had more than one name in a position), dividing them into B.J. and A.J. — Before Jack (McAuliffe) and After Jack. Kitsock explained in the introduction that the focus was on the profession of brewing. And when reading A.J. remember the list was compiled in 1999.
The top 25 B.J.
1) Louis Pasteur
2) Ferdinand P.A. Carre
3) Williams IV, Elector of Bavaria
4) Arthur Guinness
5) Adolphus Busch
6) Joseph Groll
7) Sir William Gladstone
8) George Hodgson
9) King Ludwig I
10 James Watt
11) Ralph Harwood
12) William Bass
13) Gerard Adriaan Heineken
14) Emil Hansen
15) Daniel Wheeler
16) Gabriel Sedlmayr the Younger and Anton Dreher
17) Jean Primus
18) Wayne Wheeler
19) Michael Combrune
20) Maximilian I
21) Jean De Clerck
22) Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
23) Carl Joseph Napolean
24) Saint Hildegarde
25) Robert Burns
The Top 25 A.J.
1) Michael Jackson
2) Jim Koch
3) August Busch III
4) Bob Lenz
5) Henry King
6) Bert Grant
7) Michael Hardman, Graham Lees, Jim Makin and Bill Mellor
8) Charlie Papazian
9) Fritz Maytag
10) Paul Shipman
11) Paul Camusi and Ken Grossman
12) Bill Coors
13) Robert Uihlein
14) Jack McAuliffe
15) Candy Lightner
16) Dave Bruce
17) Charles Finkel
18) Rich Yuengling Jr.
19) Dave Rehr
20) Pierre Celis
21) Alan Bond
22) Joseph Owades and Karl Strauss
23) Alan Forage and Liam Byrne
24) John Mitchell
25) Bill Owens *
* For this one it seems best to include the explanation, since Owens owned American Brewer. “His Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub was the first establishment of its kind in the U.S. (a bar where beer is pumped directly from the serving tank to your glass). Owens has revived the old colonial style of pumpkin ale, and is publisher of American Brewer, a magazine about the business of beer that bridges the gap between knowledgeable consumer and professional brewer. Most important of all, his of-the-wall style adds some fun to an industry that takes itself too seriously much of the time.”
James Davidson from Beer Bar Band in Australia has announced the topic for The Session 78: “Your Elevator Pitch for Beer.”
The explanation is not short, but your post should be.
“30 seconds is all you have to sell your pitch for better beer, before the lift reaches the destination floor. There’s no time, space or words to waste. You must capture and persuade the person’s attention as quickly as possible. When that person walks out of the elevator, you want them to be convinced that you have the right angle on how to make a better beer world.”
And there are rules:
– In less than 250 words or 30 seconds of multimedia content, write/record/create your elevator pitch for beer in which you argue you case, hoping to covert the listener to your beer cause.
– Blog/publish it online on Friday 2nd August, 2013.
– When your contribution has been posted, leave a comment with a link to your post. Alternatively, email, tweet or Facebook James with a link to your post.
Oh, and no footnotes.
Today the topic for The Session is “IPA: What’s the Big Deal?” What follows is based mostly on what’s occurring in the United States, although IPA Madness doesn’t stop at the U.S. borders, which you’ll see by visiting today’s posts (look for the links at the bottom of the announcement).
Nearly eighteen years ago, beer author-brewer-consumer Randy Mosher presented a travelogue of a recent trip to the world’s largest hops growing regions to listeners at Oldenberg Beer Camp in Kentucky. At one point he tilted his head back as if he were taking a big drink, reaching his hands into the air and grabbing fistfuls of imagined hops, then bringing them back down to his mouth.
“Americans have been starved for hops so long,” he said, “that right now we’re just shoving them down our throats.”
The implication was this would pass. It has not. I’ve cited this from Hop Culture in the United States before, but 140 years later it is still relevant:
“The brewing industry is not exempt from the influence of fashion. A careful survey of the types and descriptions of beers in vogue at different times will show that fashion has had something to do with our trade,” the author wrote. He described changes in beer dating to back before hops became an essential ingredient, and considered what might be next in England. “We will not further refer to the threatened introduction of lager beer into this country, than to say fashion takes strange freaks, and it will be well for brewers to be prepared for all eventualities.”
At the beginning of 2008 pale ale was the best selling craft beer style in supermarkets, followed by amber ale, amber lager, wheat beers, and then IPA. Yes, wheat beers, then IPA.
In the four years between the end of 2007 and end of 2011 sales of IPA increased 260 percent and it became the No. 1 craft style. The next year sales increased 40 percent again. This gets harder to measure, because now we have Black IPAs, White IPAs, Belgian IPAs, Session IPAs, and Cider IPAs.
And late Thursday, Harry Schuhmacher passed long the boldest of predictions.
I think IPAs will be to the market what pilsners are now, it make take 30 years. @lagunitasT http://t.co/wmiJ00VhGS
— Harry Schuhmacher (@BeerBizDaily) July 5, 2013
All this reflects still growing interest in aromas and flavors being discovered in hops — or more accurately, created during the brewing process. IPA has become a synomym for hops. When Mosher made his 1995 Hop Tour these are a few of the varieties that weren’t yet commercially available: Amarillo, Apollo, Bravo, Calypso, Citra, Galaxy, Mandarina Bavaria, Mosaic, Motueka, Nelson Sauvin, Riwaka, Saphir, and Simcoe. For starters.
More than once last week at the National Homebrewers Conference I was asked what the next hot aroma/flavor would be? My best guess is more variations on this theme. No doubt there will be new varieties released, maybe touting a little more gooseberry, a lot more blueberry, a subtle melon, more lime, even coconut. But, and I hope I am not just being pie-in-the-sky optimistic, brewers also have an opportunity to blend varieties already in hand — often rich in compounds that breeders and farmers worked to keep out of hops as recently as 40 years ago — to create something new.
As Alex Barth, president of hop merchant John I. Haas has pointed out, “This love craft brewers have for hops refocuses attention on the plant.” IPA deserves some of the credit. It hardly seems likely it will fall out of fashion soon, but that’s no reason to be pissed off about the attention it is getting.
Two examples. The popularity of Union Jack India Pale Ale has helped fund expansion at Firestone Walker, which is why you can get Pivo Hoppy Pils, dry hopped with generous portions of Saphir. Likewise at Marble Brewery in New Mexico. Its IPA drives growth, so beers like Marble Pilsner — brimming with perfumey Old World Hersbrucker hops — end up getting packaged. These are good things.
I seem to have wandered off topic. Hops will do that. Lord know what I’ll write about on IPA Day. Maybe coffee-infused wood-aged extreme saison IPAs.