Cold IPA backs its way into style guidelines

Creature Comforts Get Comfortable campaign

The Brewers Association released its beer style guidelines for 2022 yesterday. There are no new style additions, saving us the usual complaints about a) too many styles, and b) everything about the latest addition being all wrong.

From the press release:

“A few examples of significant updates include adding several hybrid India Pale Ale styles to the Experimental IPA category; modernizing Session Beer and Session IPA to adjust the lower end of abv downward to 0.5%, as brewer interest in lower ABV beers has increased rapidly over the past two years; and standardizing language on Juicy or Hazy Styles based on brewer and judge feedback and adding verbiage about ‘hop burn.’

“‘As the craft beer landscape continues to evolve, we want to ensure that our Beer Style Guidelines continue to be a trusted resource worldwide and are in stride with the innovation that continues to be brought forward,’ said Chris Swersey, competition director, Brewers Association. ‘We took 2022 as a year to focus on housekeeping, to address some discrepancies within the existing beer styles, and for a small number of significant updates to certain beer styles.’”

Only a few words may still amount to a significant update. Which leads us to the marriage of the established style American-Style India Pale Lager and a style in waiting, Cold IPA.

The only change in the IPL guidelines between 2021 and 2022 is in the additional notes.

2021: “This style of beer should exhibit the fresh character of hops.”

2022: “This style of beer should exhibit the fresh character of hops. Some versions may be brewed with corn, rice, or other adjunct grains, and may exhibit attributes typical of those adjuncts.”

The change leaves room for one of the things that makes Cold IPA different than IPL, the use of adjuncts to lighten the body. There’s more, and Creature Comforts Get Comfortable 2022 beer is a good way to consider that.

Creature Comforts brews Get Comfortable each year in support of its Get Comfortable campaign, and for the last four years that has been an IPA made in collaboration with (in order) Russian River Brewing, Allagash Brewing, Sierra Nevada and Bell’s Brewery. Creature COO/brewmaster Adam Beauchamp and Bell’s vice president in charge of operations John Mallett talked about the beer during a launch event earlier this month.

Beauchamp said that the grist includes 30 percent Carolina Gold rice (check) and is fermented with lager yeast at a warmer than typical for lager yeast temperature (check – the other attribute that sets Cold IPA apart from IPL). He began grinning when he pointed out, “The A in IPA stands for ale, and lager inherently is not ale.” Then he laughed.

“What that does for me, it allows a really clear expression of hops that are not muddied by yeast character,” he said. Fruity flavors that result from interaction with ale yeast are not present to clash with fruity hop flavors. Sulfur compounds that result from cold fermentation with lager years are not present to clash with sulfur compounds in hops.

“I’m tremendously excited about the style,” he said. “I think people are returning to bitter beer after a short hiatus.”

Mallett told a story about how long Bell’s founder Larry Bell may have been waiting to taste this beer.

“Larry Bell is an incredible creative force,” he began. “There was a point, this was like 12 years ago, when Larry came to me and said ‘I want to make this beer.’ What that means is ‘I want you to make this beer.’”

The beer was a lager, quite pale, with a distinctive hop character. “Specifically, he had this dream where he was hiking in the Michigan upper peninsula,” Mallet said. He came upon a waterfall cascading over rocks, and there were pine trees all around. “And this is what the beer should taste like, the crisp cold water and the pine trees,” Bell told Mallett. “And can you please make this beer?”

Mallett paused. “And I’m like, did they mention what kind of hops in the dream?”

The hops in Get Comfortable are Simcoe, Cascade, Strata, Amarillo, Mosaic and “Centennial from Bell’s selected lots.” A bit more about “Bell’s selected lots” in Hop Queries Vol. 5, No. 10, which I promise to mail by Monday.

#nottwitter06

How important are “beer snobs” to the 6,000 (or so) breweries in the country that sell fewer than 1,000 barrels of beer a year?

Because this headline: “Craft Beer Snobs Suddenly Love the Humble Lager.” It is a Wall Street Journal story (which says something in itself), so behind a paywall. But the headline, subhead and beginning of the story will give you the gist. The humble lager is back. Not sure about the arrogant one . . .

Monday beer links: Add your own commentary

Valles Caldera

Pardon the brevity. We spent the weekend in New Mexico and now are headed home, still thinking about the Valles Caldera (pictured).

Rice. Trust me. It begins like a collection of links, with a lot more commentary than here, but it is really about rice.

The Difference Between Blue Moon, Shock Top, and Hoegaarden, Explained. A real headline and a real story.

The Difference Between a Lager and an Ale (Because You’re Probably Getting It Wrong). Another real headline and real story.

Leprechaun entrance, Coleman's Authentic Irish PubGreen Beer Sunday. Still going at Coleman’s Authentic Irish Pub in Syracuse, N.Y., although for the first time without the man who started it. That’s the “leprechaun door” at Coleman’s pictured on the right.

When did pub crawls become a thing? Answers included, and a promise there’s more to be said.

Pittsburgh’s Craft Breweries and Taprooms Offer More than Just Great Beer. Way above average pub crawl.

Adventure. On the hunt for cask in London. Encouraging.

The 1904 Brewery Strike – Part One. From Toronto.

Do Beer Sites Really Keep Track of Your Birthday? This is absolutely the question I woke up in the middle of the night asking myself.

WORD

Monday beer links: Tiny beers, indie beers, hop men

Ron Pattinson visits Elsewhere Brewing

Remember when Lew Bryson started The Session Beer Project in 2007? He originally set the cap for session beers at 5.5% ABV, then lowered it to 4.5%. And finding truly flavorful beers that met the standard was not particularly easy.

Now it seems as if 2.5% ABV is the new 4.5%. Such beers may be labeled “low alcohol.” “Building quality low-alcohol beer is a balancing act,” Josh Bernstein writes in The New York Times. Among others, Bernstein talked with Todd DiMatteo, brewer and co-founder at Good Word Brewing & Public House in Duluth, Georgia. He also mentioned Little Beer, a festival Good Word will host in April.

The first Little Beer, held last May, was the first and last festival I have attended since Covid arrived in the United States. The 2022 lineup is spectacular in a different way than the also spectacular lineup for Side Project Invitational the same day. I plan to write more about that later.

A bit of disclosure. DiMatteo and I are friends. I once hung out and helped brew a 3.5% ABV beer at Good Word that we called Lunar Gravity. (One Untappd contributor gave it 4 1/2 stars and wrote “Definitely good for a lager.”) Last week, among the reasons I was back in Georgia was because Ron Pattinson came to the U.S. to drink a beer DiMatteo brewed from a recipe Pattinson wanted to taste.

The beer is called No Wooden Shoes and is a 3.5% ABV Dutch-style Donkerbier. About four dozen Georgia brewers showed up at Good Word on Thursday to listen to Pattinson talk about low-gravity English beers. I sat beside him and answered a few questions about hops, but I know why they braved Atlanta traffic to get to Duluth.

On Wednesday, Pattinson and I visited a few Georgia breweries. The photo at the top was taken at Elsewhere Brewing and that’s brewer Josh Watterson with him in front of 12 horizontal tanks (six fermentation tanks, six serving vessels).

Now, back to regular programming.

COMPARE & CONTRAST
“Selling out” revisited. This is quite a sentence: “At its zenith, craft beer might have achieved something close to that kind of (beer-centric) social, civic saturation, but those days are in the rearview now.” Perhaps this overstates the import of craft beer in the decade of your choice and at the same time understates its ongoing impact within smaller communities.

Bell’s Brewery has 1,300 employees. What’s it going to be like to work there in five years and what will Eccentric Day be like? I’m willing to wait and see. What will it be like at New Belgium Brewing, which is now “integrating” with Bell’s? There is a standard to live up to (see the next section and Brian Callahan).

[Insert headline]. Try as I may I could not come up with a few words to summarize this story that doesn’t come off churlish. The Brewers Association independent craft brewer seal has caught plenty of flack since it was introduced in 2017, but it helped make “indie brewer” part of our vocabulary. I expect that the founders of Indie Brewing are good neighbors and don’t deserve a headline that reads, “Indie Brewing Is Dead.”

‘WOW, I THINK I COULD DO THIS’
He started as a volunteer, bottling beer. He was the company’s first employee owner. He finished happily working on the grounds crew. A very New Belgiumesque story.

A FORGOTTEN RUNT
An exploration of sour and our evolutionary past. Or why you wouldn’t give a tomato or lemon to a sheep.

BUSINESS PAGES
“It’s been years since a new beer ad reached pop culture status.” I can live with that.

Discarding gender roles. “There is no more important narrative in the last century of U.S. alcohol than the rise of women drinkers.”

Related: In The New Brewer (available in print and to Brewers Association members online) “Beer’s Tenacious Gender Gap” concludes “Someday we may look back and see this era as the time when our culture tools its first baby steps away from the whole idea of categorizing human traits as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine.’”

When Fuller’s was funky. Ah, yes, the 70s.

I’m confused. The subhead on this story states, “As baby boomers retire and buy less wine, producers need new ways to tempt a White Claw generation back from other alcoholic drinks.” But within there is this quote: “A brand’s social values are increasingly connected to a consumer’s decision to purchase particular products, including wine.” I would like to see the memo revealing White Claw’s social values.

HOP MAN
Why was I not given this option when answering census questions?

Monday beer links: Probably overthinking things . . .

Barrels at work
New Pete Brown posts are rare (the last before Friday was June 4), but these 1,300-plus words were worth waiting for. They aren’t all his words. He has mined comments from thet “sewers that run below the lines of Daily Mail articles” and, well, maybe I should back up.

CAMRA has asked its members to fill out a questionnaire.

Brown explains, “After years of being criticised for only being relevant to white middle-aged men, CAMRA is asking how it might broaden its audience from that base. After decades of women reporting that they are patronised, ignored ridiculed, harassed or even assaulted at beer events, CAMRA is asking people for their experiences, to gauge how serious the problem is and, if necessary (spoiler alert: it is) to do something about it.

“Speaking as an overweight, bearded, middle-aged real ale drinker, I’d say this is long overdue, and is to be welcomed.”

Not by those he cites.

Easy to read. Hard truths.

GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY
The governor of Oregon ordered flags in the state be flown at half-staff to honor Austin Smith, a volunteer firefighter, who suffered critical injuries Thursday from an explosion while he was fighting a barn fire in his hometown of St. Paul, population 480. I know this because Friday multiple hop farms I follow on Twitter and Instagram sent their condolences. Smith, a sixth generation hop farmer, was manager of B&D Farms and also had plans to open a brewery.

The story I linked to does not mention hops or beer. Alan McLeod describes himself as “a beer community denier.” I don’t necessarily agree, but sometimes I would rather think about beer and community and their impact on each other than the fraternity of beer/brewing. This story is a reminder of what it means to serve a community.

NATIVE LAND
Each can of Native Land beer acknowledges the ancestral land the brewery that made the beer is located on. Here’s another reason that matters.

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LEDE OF THE WEEK

“Wherever there’s a row of railway arches, a brewery is inevitable.”

And so begins “Little Martha: a new stop in Bristol’s brewery quarter” from Boak & Bailey.

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MESSAGE IN A CAN
In this case one that contained Labatt Ice. “A phenomenon like craft beer, itself in constant evolution, is not the final arbiter of beer taste.”

NA
-Dry January in Germany.
-Dry January in Chicago.

ON HOLD
Flagship February.

STOP OVERTHINKING IT
The shape of your wine beer glass doesn’t really matter. Actually, it does, but not that much. And clean matters a lot more. The important message here is, “Stop overthinking it.”

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

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