Another thing that will be featured on this page in addition to brewery reviews, will be explanations and the history of different styles of beers. Since yesterday, Thursday, August 1st was national IPA day, we are going to talk about the undisputed king of the craft beer world, the India Pale Ale.
You can’t walk into a beer store or brewery without being overwhelmed with the amount of IPAs that they will have in stock or on tap. IPAs are the most divisive style of beer in the brewing industry, for better or for worse, you either love them or you hate them. The two things that I hear the most working behind the bar from guests, “What IPAs do you have on tap? I only drink IPAs”. Or the counterpart, “What do you have on tap that isn’t an IPA? I hate IPAs.” It can also be a style that people hate initially but learn to love, or people love it initially and then it wears off on them over time.
The India Pale Ale was initially brewed in the early 1800’s in England, and it was brewed as an export beer by the British East India Company. The IPAs of these times were vastly different from the IPAs you will come across today.
Back then IPAs were lightly hopped Pale ales, and not the super hop forward IPAs we associate the style with today. The IPA was made with the idea of being able to ship beer from England to India by boat, and for it to still taste good when it got there. The increased amount of hops in the IPA would help preserve the beer on long voyages over the sea. This proved to be very successful in maintaining freshness of the beer and thus the India Pale Ale was born. This also shows another big difference between the IPAs then and of now, now it is recommended that you drink IPAs as fresh as possible, whereas in the 1800s it was the best way to preserve beer for long periods of time. They also were not as high in ABV as their counterparts today are, being only slightly higher in ABV than most beers of the time.
IPAs retained their popularity in England throughout most of the 1800s, and were gaining popularity and being exported to New Zealand and Australia in addition to India. By the late 1800s and early 1900s versions of American, Canadian, and Australian IPAs started to pop up from various different brewers and records suggest that they were very similar to English IPAs of the time.
After World War 1, IPAs began to decrease in popularity and became not as available as they once were. This trend continued for almost half a century. Fast forward to the 1970s and they started to regain popularity in England, as demand for “real ale” began to increase. But right around the late 1980s and early 1990s as the craft beer revolution was starting to ramp up in America, brewers began looking at historical styles to start brewing, and on the west coast the IPA was beginning to gain more and more traction.
The early versions of craft American IPAs from the 1990s were your hoppy west coast versions of the IPA. From there the IPA continued to evolve into the behemoth it is today. In addition to west coast IPAs, we now have Double IPAs, Triple IPAs, Brut IPAs, Rye IPAs, Black IPAs, Session IPAs, Hazy/New England IPAs, Milkshake IPAs, Tropical IPAs, White IPAs and many, many more variations of our favorite hoppy beverage. If I had another couple of years to type, I could probably get to every version of IPA that is brewed in the world. I don’t have that kind of time, so sorry if your favorite style was left off the list.
IPAs have gotten so big that it is estimated that sales of IPAs account for over 40% of all beer sold in the American craft brewing sector. That is a whole ton of IPA that is being sold. So now you know why every brewery you go to has at least one IPA or more on tap at all times.
So whether you find them delicious or repulsive, we should all raise our glasses in a toast to the India Pale Ale. Without the popularity that they gained throughout the years, we probably wouldn’t have over 400 breweries in Michigan, and close to almost 10,000 in the United States today. Without the IPA keeping many places in business, we might not get to try all the other delicious styles of beer that brewers keep alive at craft breweries all over the United States and the World. Beer tourism might not be a thriving industry, and we might all be doomed to drinking mass produced light beer for the rest of our lives without our good friend the India Pale Ale.
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