Not quite the Endgame yet for IPA

Captain Milkshake IPA’s
fiendish disguise as a signboard

What are you drinking? Chances are that it is an IPA. Possibly, West Coast, maybe New England or even sour, with added blueberry and peach as I (sort-of) enjoyed the other week. Even though it’s been the case for the best part of a decade or more, the IPA in all its guises is still the leading beer style at the front of the craft beer bar-top — as well as at other bars, if the amount of times I have overheard ‘what’s your IPA’ being asked in ‘normal’ pubs is any indication. There are even jokes doing the beer social media round that black IPA is making a comeback; meanwhile on the other hand last year’s sensation, Brut IPA, seems to have crashed and burned already.

I am not surprised. When I was over in Columbus, OH, in February, I was in the Elevator Brewery tap and had their Brut IPA. It was sweet, slightly champagne-like, sickly almost, whereas the ones I had tried from other breweries in 2018 were dry and rather appealing — I’m not seeing so many brewers having a go at producing one either, so perhaps it has gone the way of all flesh. Meanwhile back in the USA, as I drank the beer and considered my disappointment and recalled how someone had told me about Rose IPA, I began to mull on how IPA has splintered into so many different sub-styles, some of them as distant from what we once knew as an IPA as a Model T Ford is from the latest hybrid car (but then you could still say both are cars, of a kind). 

So far, so typically beer-flecked navel gazing and then I went to see The Avengers: Endgame. After sitting through three hours of plenty of action, with a lot of it referencing other movies in the canon, it dawned on me — the IPA style has become the beer world’s version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For those of you who don’t know your Ironman from the rag-and-bone man, the MCU is a media franchise and a shared universe that revolves around a series of superhero films, such as Ironman, Captains America and Marvel and the Black Panther. 

Some are excellent, some good and several I’d wouldn’t even watch if it was the only movie on a long transatlantic flight. The main thing is though, that they take place in this Marvel world, where Thor might pop up in an Avengers movie as much as his own and even Spiderman, who we always thought lived in his own world, makes an appearance elsewhere. 

To take the analogy further, I would argue that the first film in the franchise, Ironman, was Hollywood’s version of an American IPA and then the following sequels were representations of each different IPA. Thor perhaps was a brutish West Coast hop bomb, while Dr Strange has got to be a Milkshake IPA, style over substance; meanwhile Captain America is an uncomplicated DIPA, forceful and no messing about. 

However, there is also a fashion within Hollywood, for prequels, origin stories for the many sequels (and Marvel is not alone in being guilty of this) that are pumped out into our multiplexes. And I have a very good idea of what a prequel IPA would be about — the English style IPA, the one that seems to be forgotten about, languishing in the fleapits of beer history, often declared not to style because it doesn’t look like Sunny Delight and taste like a can of Lilt. 

There are English IPAs being made, but they seem to be far and few between. Cheshire Brewhouse’s Govinda is one of my favourites, with brewer Shane Swindells making two expressions of the beer, with each one using a different heritage malt. And of course, there’s Worthington White Shield, which I had several times on cask at the Kings Arms near Waterloo last year — this still remains an excellent beer, which I first encountered in college when a friend bought a bottle in a pub we were in and bored me rigid about the yeast in the bottle. How times change.  

The Burton link neatly takes me to the news that during May an IPA was brewed for the first time ever on Marston’s famous Burton Unions, which up until now have been used for Pedigree and various pale ales. It will be brewed by Marston’s ‘playground for brewers’ DE14, called No:1 Horninglow Street IPA, and will be 7.4% and bottle-conditioned. The beer’s raw ingredients are low-colour pale ale malts, and it will be late and dry hopped with four hop varieties, Goldings, Sovereign and the splendidly named Ernest from the UK, as well as Cascade from the USA — the latter being perhaps a nod towards modern tastes, but we must also recall that American hops were common in English breweries before the First World War. 

I for one am looking forward to trying this beer, which certainly does seem to be more of a prequel than a sequel to the IPA universe. With the release of The Avengers: Endgame, I might have had enough of the MCU for a while, as I do with each new IPA, but with No:1 Horninglow Street IPA (as well as the likes of Govinda) perhaps we are on the verge of a whole new sequel-free IPA universe being created. 

This was originally published in the current issue of Brewing & Beverage Industries Business (which can be read here), where I write a regular column. I would like to thank Chris Freer for allowing me to reproduce it. 

Remember Artois Bock

And so I tried several of the Marston’s revivalist beers over the weekend, which the postman had struggled up the path with: I enjoyed the Dark IPA and the Steam Beer, though my brow furrowed at the Saison, which I thought miles away from what I recognise a saison to be; it was lacking in austerity and flintiness and felt fat and ale-like on the palate. There was some boiled lemon sweetness but it confirmed the view that I had felt when first drinking it at Craft Beer Rising: it wasn’t a saison, even though the right yeast was used. It was drinkable but if you are going to call something a saison I would expect it to have some of its characteristics. Hey ho. Several months before, I had also tried the Greene King speciality beers with which the postman had struggled up the path and enjoyed a couple and felt let down by the rest. But at least they’re trying I thought.

However, the other thing that the beers propelled into the forefront of my thoughts was a memory of InBev’s Artois Bock, which perhaps one could say was one of the first attempts by a massive brewery to go all craft. Released in 2005 after much tasting and contemplation by the likes of Michael Jackson and Mark Dorber, it had, according to a piece I wrote in the Morning Advertiser at the time, ‘a smart stainless steel font and bespoke glassware, while quirky ads told the trade of this new arrival in what was called the “Artois family”’. No mention of the taste then.

One of my main memories of it was that in 2005 I was in my first year as secretary of the British Guild of Beer Writers and one of our major awards was sponsored by Artois Bock and InBev, which didn’t go down well with some members (InBev had announced the closure of the Hoegaarden brewery at the time). It was served at the Guild’s awards and dinner (and untouched by some) along with caramelized boneless quail with grapes, shallots and a Fuller’s Honey Gold reduction, accompanied by sweet and sour endive; meanwhile a wine writer won the eponymous award. The Artois family was then joined by something called Peeterman, an ethereal (read bland) light beer and then the ‘oak-aged’ lager Eiken Artois — all went the way of the ark in 2008.

I suppose it was all an attempt to give the brewers of Stella a bit of an upmarket cache, but as soon as I saw bottles of the Bock knocked down to £1 in the supermarkets I guessed the beer’s days were numbered — the beer was ok, but I seem to recall being underwhelmed by its character, disappointed, especially as the tasting notes on a chalkboard in the White Horse seemed to bear little relationship to what was in my glass (I blamed myself). Meanwhile, Peeterman was incredibly watery and I never even bothered to try Eiken.

I hope that the larger breweries continue to produce their niche beers, if only to demonstrate that their brewers can make good beers beyond the ones they make day in and day out (I also hope that they can perform that great mythical dance of being a ‘gateway beer’). However, if you see the bottles discounted in the supermarket then remember Artois Bock, the beery Nineveh of its day.