![]() ![]() Why brew a hazy IPA? Is it just for looks?įor one, not all small brewers have the ability to filter their beer. (Like we said earlier, unfiltered beer has been around a lot longer than filtered beer!) At Stone Brewing – Napa, we’ve never had a filter. It wasn’t in the budget, but we’ve made it work and brewed countless amazing unfiltered beers on our brew system there – hazy and less so. Stone /// Hazy Double IPA's haze comes from a combination of wheat and barley. These are all big, insoluble organic compounds, and with the right recipe & brewing techniques, they’ll remain colloidal in the beer – meaning the haze will hang around instead of settling into a sediment. If a beer has fruit, like Tangerine Express, fruit pectins might also add to the mix. That’s because wheat has a much higher protein content than barley, the main ingredient in beer.Īlong with grain protein from wheat and barley, there can also be solid compounds from hop oils (called polyphenols) and even starch from oats if a brewer decides to use them. To get a little bit more specific, the main component making up the haze in your IPA is grain protein. If you’ve ever had a wheat beer, you’ve probably seen haze there too. Solid matter from beer ingredients (we’re talking microscopic compounds) makes up the haze in an IPA, and it’s doing a lot more than just looking cloudy. Hazy IPAs are like a beautiful union of solid and liquid. We tend to use a different yeast strain for our hazy IPAs than we do for our West Coast-style and filtered IPAs. Many brewers use wheat, oats, or a combination of both in addition to barley. Hops that are high in tropical, fruity aroma compounds tend to lend themselves best to these recipes. Making sure the beer is dense enough to keep the haze suspended is important as well, meaning you don’t want it fermenting too dry (unlike a classic West Coast IPA, which is typically dry and crisp). Sometimes that can affect the yeast you choose to ferment with. It’s a bit trickier to strike a delicate balance between the right ingredients and process to achieve a stellar hazy IPA. Simply leaving out the step of filtration, however, won’t necessarily result in a great-tasting beer with consistent, uniform haze that lasts. After all, beer’s been around much longer than beer filtration has. Both filtered and unfiltered beers have their benefits! It’s not earth-shattering, but it’s well executed, easy to drink, with appealing fruit flavors.Of course, there are other beer styles that are traditionally unfiltered – wheat beers like hefeweizens, Belgian white ales and many classic European styles, for example. The tangerine comes through most in the aftertaste. Overall: “The base IPA is typical of a West Coast IPA, and the fruit is not as in-your-face as some examples, but it’s well-balanced across the board. The malt is sweet, with a nice biscuit character.” The hops bitterness is moderate, playing a supportive role. Orange comes through more than tangerine and is fairly restrained in the mix-comes across as a standard IPA with good citrus and resinous hops flavors, with a clean bitterness, and light, bready malt. This is accented by herbal, floral, catty, piney, dank hops, with a slight bread crust and biscuit malt character.”įlavor: “The citrus and hops flavors blend into an appealing mélange, with the quality of the citrus rind combining with a balance of malt and hops. ![]() We add just a hint of whole pineapple for a backnote.” What our panel thoughtĪroma: “Distinct tangerine, with orange and citrus, which are lower in the mix. “We use bountiful whole tangerine puree, which brings pithy, crisp bitterness to the citrus flavor. ![]()
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