Hopfuck!
That was the name of the beer blowing my mind, sipped from a plastic cup—filled via picnic tap and corny keg—in a large cellar under a fake Old West saloon in New Haven, Missouri, in August 2009.
What I had never tasted before—not like this—was a punchy explosion of grapefruit backed by light, fresh pine. It was bitter as hell but not tongue-coating. There was some caramel, but that wasn’t weird—it was just a platform for all that hop flavor, its sweetness pushing that juicy citrus, its roundness pillowing that piney bitterness.
The person who made this, I thought, is some kind of hop-wizard.
The person who made it is Steve Crider, cofounder and brewer at 2nd Shift, which opened several months after our local homebrew club paid him a visit. In going public, Crider wisely changed the beer’s name to Art of Neurosis—because he was, and is, neurotic about it. “That’s the beer I’ve jacked with the most, and tweaked on the most, and messed with the most of any beer I’ve brewed, probably to this day.”
He’s still jacking with Art of Neurosis—and we’ll get to that—but I’ll always remember its true name, and I’ll remember how it shifted my paradigm for what hops can do in beer. Even today, whenever we talk about the throwback style we call American IPA, I always think about Hopfuck.
Still Cranking Out the Hits
Here’s our current situation: Over the past eight years or so, hazy IPA was ascendant. It’s still popular, but now we often see a different modifier appear: “West Coast.” It’s code for clarity, for the bitterness and crisp profile that’s emerged as a counterpoint to hazy, sweetish, and soft.
If you spend too much time in taprooms—it’s OK, you’re among friends—it’s tempting to think that we’re looking at the two dominant strains of IPA today: hazy/New England and clear/West Coast. That’s not the reality.
Consider: The Brewers Association added the Juicy or Hazy IPA category to the Great American Beer Festival competition in 2018. However, it wasn’t until 2023 that West Coast–Style IPA got its own category. Until then, brewers making the leaner, paler, drier style were competing in the category called American-Style IPA.
Competitions matter to brewers, but the categories also reflect what people are brewing and drinking in the real world. The significance of the new category is twofold: First, West Coast IPA now has the home it deserves. Second: American IPA gets to be its own thing. It can reclaim its identity.
So, what makes American IPA different? There are a few things—a little bit of caramel malt, a little more color, a little more sweetness and body—and there are some implications that follow. Those differences permit a wallop of bitterness that can get a bit resinous without disrupting the balance. Arguably, they also limit your choice of hops—not everything goes with that profile. Big-time citrus-pine is the usual approach. (Overripe papaya funk, not so much.)
Sounds old-fashioned, right? An apt observation comes from Vinnie Cilurzo, cofounder and brewmaster at Russian River in Santa Rosa and Windsor, California: “The American IPA you’re talking about is like a snapshot in time.”
True. And yet it didn’t fade into obscurity. What it did was evolve—and it sells.
Most top-selling IPAs are still of this type—clear but not straw-pale, with enough body and sweetness to carry real bitterness. Looking at IPAs in retail sales (through the end of March, according to Chicago-based market research firm Circana), we find these six in the top 10: Voodoo Ranger Imperial IPA (1st), Elysian Space Dust IPA (4th), Lagunitas IPA (5th), Bell’s Two Hearted Ale (6th), Founders All-Day IPA (7th), and Cigar City Jai Alai IPA (9th).
Incidentally, the other four in the top 10 are hazy.
Going Back to the Analog
Temecula, California, is about 30 miles from the beach in Oceanside—about as West Coast as you can get without getting your feet wet. That’s where Cilurzo grew up and started homebrewing in the late 1980s. It’s also where he and Natalie Cilurzo in 1994 founded Blind Pig Brewing, and where he started brewing the influential Blind Pig IPA.
“We didn’t call it West Coast IPA,” Cilurzo says. That wasn’t a thing “because there was only English IPA. … So, what we were making just naturally was American IPA because it was being done with American hops.”
The American IPAs that emerged in the ’80s and ’90s weren’t the first brewed on American soil. It would be negligent to ignore Ballantine IPA, first brewed in 1890 in New Jersey, and known for its oak maturation and bitter smack of English hops. (Pabst now owns the brand and recently revived it, again.)
However, if American IPA needs a birth year—and it doesn’t, really—there’s a case to be made for 1983. That’s when Bert Grant’s India Pale Ale appeared in Yakima, Washington, British-inspired but packed with the Cascade hops that Grant loved. That’s also the year Sierra Nevada released the fresh-hopped Celebration Ale in something like its current form.
Yet it would be years before American IPA established its own identity.
“In fact, when American IPA was gaining popularity, Natalie and I would wander the halls of the Great American Beer Festival, just looking for IPA,” Cilurzo says. “And most were English. When we did find those that were making ‘American IPA,’ they were often the same color as an ESB or an English IPA—they had that dark copper color, you know, red, sometimes amber.”
The sliver of caramel malt that remains in American IPA is a strand of DNA that connects it with those English-inspired examples. A fervent embrace of American hops didn’t mean a dramatic change in malt bill—not right away. That came later, and gradually.
Popularity also came gradually. “It was so hard to sell IPA at the time,” Cilurzo says. “We made a Golden Ale at Blind Pig as well. We definitely sold more Golden Ale than we did Blind Pig IPA.”
The early movement in American IPA was “100 percent brewer-driven,” he says. “The consumers weren’t asking for hops. That was just brewers making what we wanted to drink. And then, in time, consumers picked up on it, and off it went.”
Over the next decade, the brewer-driven trend would kick into another gear. A moment of acceleration came in June 2004, at the National Homebrewers Conference in Las Vegas. That’s where Cilurzo first shared a homebrew recipe for Russian River’s Pliny the Elder—and it took off. Via homebrew mags, blogs, and message boards, it went nationwide.
“I’d never had the beer, but it was rated the best beer in the world,” 2nd Shift’s Crider says of Pliny. “I really copied that.” Hopfuck was his spin on it.
Meanwhile, just outside Cleveland, Matt Cole was at Rocky River Brewing, tinkering with an IPA called Hop Goblin. Its inspiration: what else?
“Honestly, it was a Pliny knockoff,” Cole says. “There was this Zymurgy issue, right? And it had Vinnie’s recipe. And I fucking just manipulated it. I just took all of his additions, and I twisted them around. … I followed what Vinnie did—not necessarily verbatim with hops—but he knew how to layer hops, man, and how to get the best out of them. And he’s influenced a lot of people, you know?”
Besides Cliruzo, Cole says he learned a lot from other California brewers, including Arne Johnson at Marin and Rich Norgrove of Bear Republic. “They were hitting it harder,” taking steps to preserve hop oils, reduce vegetal matter, and more.
When he cofounded the Fat Head’s brewpub in 2009, Cole updated Hop Goblin to become Head Hunter IPA. He still tinkers, even if it accounts for about 45 percent of sales and wins lots of awards. Anyway, it’ll be hard to top last year: Even before we named it one of our Best 20 Beers of 2023 after blind tasting, Head Hunter won gold at the World Beer Cup, and then did it again at GABF.
Its category? American-Style IPA.
The Malt, Remastered
Early on, West Coast brewers were influencing American IPA—but West Coast IPAs were different back then. Consider one of the beers responsible for coining the style: Green Flash West Coast IPA, released in 2004. Then, as now, it was reddish-amber, featuring a comforting dollop of British crystal in the form of Bairds Carastan (30–40°L).
For years, Blind Pig IPA included some 40°L crystal. “I don’t remember the mindset, but it was still a pretty small percentage,” Cilurzo says. He mentions Sacramento’s Rubicon IPA and Pizza Port’s Swami’s IPA in San Diego as two early examples in that mold. “What really made these IPAs stand out so much was the fact that, yes, they did have crystal malt—but it was really small amounts.”
Today, that’s exactly what defines American IPA. “We’re not talking about some of the percentages that we saw in the ’90s or even early 2000s for that matter,” Cilurzo says. “We’re talking maybe 2 or 3 percent.”
It doesn’t take much to make an impression.
“I still think that’s a necessary thing in these beers,” says Alexandra Nowell, former head brewer at Three Weavers in Los Angeles, now working toward setting up a new brewery, Mellotone Beer Project, in Cincinnati. “But we’re talking really light—C-15, light-grade crystal that can still provide a little bit more complexity to the beer itself. … I think the concept of American IPA has drifted into a more modern place.”
Caramel malt has become uncool among IPA brewers today. Many avoid it altogether, while others have reduced, lightened, and fine-tuned it—essentially, they’ve learned how to use it with finesse.
Incidentally, the best IPA I had last year has about 10 percent C-15 in its malt bill. Head Hunter’s base malt has evolved, too—it’s two-row these days, but it used to include Maris Otter, “just to get the body up,” Cole says. “And we did that for years. That goes to show you that there was a point where body meant something—when you’re gonna pound the fuck out of what we did from a hops standpoint. But, in hindsight, all we were doing was just decreasing our drinkability.”
At 2nd Shift, Art of Neurosis is a dramatic case of American IPA’s evolution. Despite its inspiration, Crider immediately started molding Hopfuck to his own Midwestern tastes, brewing what he calls a “chewier” beer. (The brewery still proudly markets Art of Neurosis as “a hop sandwich.”) He embraced crystal 40°L and mashed high—158–159°F (70°C). “And I did that for years,” he says. Long one of their top sellers, Art of Neurosis won a following among St. Louis brewers who wanted to know how he was doing it. “It blew their minds with the mashing temps and the hop additions,” Crider says. “Like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’”
Over the past four or five years, however, Crider’s own tastes have shifted toward drier and more drinkable. He’s lowered the mash temps and reduced the C-40 down to about 2 percent—“so, it’s nothing,” he says. He’s also gone from a two-row base to splitting 50/50 with pils and two-row, “just to dry it up.” It’s gone from orange-amber to a pale golden hue. It’s lighter in body, but it’s still big and bitter and full of punchy hop flavor.
Crider says he’s pondered cutting out the C-40 altogether—fully embracing the West Coast style—but his wife and co-owner Libby Crider won’t let him. “She loves it. It’s her favorite beer.”
Besides changing tastes, there’s another reason for the reduction in caramel malts—they’re famously prone to oxidation. Staleness is a problem when you’re trying to showcase beautifully fresh hop character.
“I always think about the beer sitting at Stinky Joe’s Liquor Store in the middle of nowhere,” Crider says. “There’s always going to be a store where someone’s going to come in and go, ‘What, who is 2nd Shift? What is the Art of Neurosis?’ They’re going to open that can and … they don’t know it’s two years old, but it tastes like shit.”
When asked how the malts affect shelf life, Cole responds with an answer about packaging. Fat Head’s sent Head Hunter to competitions last year with packaged dissolved-oxygen levels in the low teens, he says. “Our whole process is so solid, we don’t even fucking worry about shit like that. That’s how we win awards.”
First and foremost, Cole credits a production team devoted to quality. “Head Hunter didn’t win off of our pilot breweries,” he says. “It won off of our main production line. And that’s a testament to all the various steps that we took to reduce oxygen and increase shelf life and keep the hop character intact. And that’s a team effort. Machines can do it—they can help. But it takes people—great, talented, passionate people.”
The Hops, Remastered
Nowell, who went from brewing at Three Weavers to working as technical advisor for the hop growers at CLS Farms in Moxee, Washington, lays out what she views as the most important component to American IPA: “Hop aroma,” she says. “I think that you need to have a really bright and inviting aroma to even come close to calling yourself an American-style IPA.”
When Cilurzo delivers talks on the history of West Coast IPA—which, as we’ve established, begins with the history of American IPA—he enjoys sharing the timeline of new hop releases. It starts with the slow beat of Cascade (1972) and Comet (1974) before gradually picking up rhythm with Centennial and CTZ (both 1990). It really starts to thrum with Amarillo (1998), Nelson Sauvin, and Simcoe (both 2000), then it gets seriously up-tempo with Citra (2008), Galaxy (2009), El Dorado (2010), and Mosaic (2012). Finally, it goes all breakbeat-hardcore techno into Sabro (2018), Talus (2019), and beyond.
With players like those, how could anyone expect the classic-rock opera of American IPA to remain the same?
Nowell’s own tastes run more toward the West Coast. That’s what she brewed at Three Weavers, including their flagship Expatriate IPA. However, she also views that style—and hazies, too—as more compatible with the newer, higher-impact hop varieties. A little caramel can play beautifully with grapefruit zest and pine resin; not so much with piña colada.
“That was a really huge shift in what was available aromatically, and it just doesn’t go as well,” Nowell says. “We’re living in a tropical realm of hop character these days. … If you’re going to talk about utilizing Galaxy and Citra and then filling your beer with crystal malt, I think you’re completely wasting these really expensive, really impactful varieties.”
Many of these newer, popular varieties—including Citra, Mosaic, and Simcoe—are proprietary, rather than bred by the USDA for the public. Whatever the merits, it’s beyond dispute that these private varieties accelerated the popularity of IPA.
“Once private hops got brought into the picture, they were so much more impactful than public hops,” Cilurzo says. “That’s really when IPAs started to explode. … I love to make fun of these brewers who came along when Citra and Mosaic were already in existence. I’m like, ‘Well, how easy is that? It’s easy to make an IPA with those hops.’”
Nowell says that if she were going to brew an American IPA with a small portion of light crystal—and she very well might, at Mellotone—she would reach for Simcoe. “I think it bridges the gap between still maintaining some of that piney, resinous character you can get, but with that cattiness—that sort of black-currant cattiness. Grapefruit, as well. That plays incredibly well in old-school beers.”
Another she’d suggest is Idaho 7. “You’re pulling in pineapple—but I call it pineapple-dank because you still have that really heavy sort of back-end cannabis dankness that plays really well with crystal malts.”
Advanced hop products are another innovation that brewers of American IPA have embraced. Mixing in cryogenic hops and extracts allows a reduction in vegetal matter, increasing efficiency and amplifying more desirable aromas.
At 2nd Shift, Art of Neurosis has always gotten a whirlpool charge of Simcoe, Centennial, and Columbus; today, it includes Simcoe Cryo. At Fat Head’s, Head Hunter also gets later kettle additions of Simcoe Cryo.
Brewers also continue to innovate in how they deploy the hops—and often there’s a mix of old and new methods. At Fat Head’s, Cole says, “We’re a pretty heavily invested whole-flower brewery. So, we use a lot of hopback.” Besides a range of kettle additions, Head Hunter gets a sizeable whirlpool charge, a run through the hopback with whole-cone Mosaic and Simcoe, and plenty of dry hops.
Late-kettle and whirlpool additions are critical to achieving the full spectrum of hop flavor for a great American IPA. Fat Head’s spins its whirlpools at 185°F (85°C). “Like tea or coffee, we all know that there’s an optimum range to be able to extract all those things, and hops are the same way,” Cole says.
Bitterness matters, too. “American IPA, it’s got a little resinous core to it,” Cole says. “And it needs that fucking abrasiveness to make it a tad bit fucking different.”
Yet we’re long past the days of giving drinkers a resin-punch to the tongue. Cole describes earlier versions of Head Hunter as “much more abrasively bitter. … I look back at old recipes, and the amount of hops we were adding early in the boil was just ridiculous, and really sharp. … The beer has evolved to meet more of the consumer palate.”
However, it’s still bitter. And it’s still got that healthy portion of C-15. “We make it the way we like to drink it,” Cole says.
Art of Neurosis is still bitter, too. And even if it’s gotten leaner, the things that made it taste ahead of its time in 2009—those flavors that blew my mind—they’re still there. It gets several kettle additions, a big whirlpool charge, and two dry-hop charges. “I was double dry hopping before anybody,” Crider says. “I thought that’s how you made good beer. And now everybody brags about it and puts DDH on every can.”
He’s also adjusted the water from a balanced profile to one with a higher sulfite-to-chloride ratio, for a crisper finish—essentially moving closer to modern West Coast. They also watch the pH, aiming to keep it low. He says he doesn’t want the beer formerly known as Hopfuck to lose relevancy just because he was afraid to change it.
“I don’t want to leave it stale, sitting on the back shelf all the time. Make it better, stay with the times. And personally I like it better, too.”