The Pabst Brewing Company, which acquired the Ballantine brand in 2005, announced last week that it is bringing back America’s original India Pale Ale following a 30-year hiatus. And they’re not just bringing back the brand: They’re resurrecting the historic ale as it was brewed in its heyday.
Greg Deuhs, Pabst master brewer by day and forensic homebrewer by night, spent more than two years meticulously piecing together historical records, sensory descriptions, and testimonials from those who still remember the original Ballantine IPA, which was brewed in one form or another from 1878 to the middle of the Nixon administration.
Long interested in historic recipes, Deuhs proposed the idea of commercially reviving Ballantine IPA when he moved from Redhook to Pabst in 2012. After gaining approval to proceed, he began brewing batch after batch of homebrew, five gallons at a time, in his kitchen (pictured at top). In all, Deuhs came up with more than twenty different recipes before he and his colleagues at Pabst felt comfortable moving forward.
Deuhs and his fellow brewers selected five of his recipes for further consideration, and the final formulation is an amalgamation of the best aspects of those five finalists. But recreating Ballantine’s famous IPA meant overcoming some interesting challenges.
“For one thing, we had to find hops that aren’t all that common anymore,” says Deuhs. While Northern Brewer and Fuggle remain popular with homebrewers and professional craft brewers alike, older varieties such as Bullion and Cluster proved more difficult to source in the quantities needed for commercial brew lengths.
Furthermore, Ballantine’s original IPA relied on a unique method for hop flavor and aroma. Ground hops were cooked in a partial vacuum to distill the essential oils out of the vegetal material, and these hop oils were added to the beer in lieu of traditional dry hops. The beer was then aged for a year or more in wooden vats.
The Ballantine IPA nouveau, which is all-malt and adjunct-free, features historic ingredients and techniques but also includes modern hops such as Cascade and Columbus.
Another obstacle was separating fact from fiction, for Ballantine’s bold brew of the past remains shrouded in folklore. Between Ballantine’s 1970s relocation from Newark, New Jersey, to the Narragansett Brewery in Cranston, Rhode Island, and the subsequent contracting of the brew to outside concerns, historical recipes and brew logs are scarce. And though a product called Ballantine IPA was brewed well into the 1990s, it had become what Deuhs calls “a Milwaukee shell of its former self.”
Discovering what had been beneath that shell in the decades before to Ballantine’s decline was no easy task. “There is very little archival information about Ballantine’s IPA in the 1960s and 1970s,” Deuhs observes. It’s rumored that workers ran off with boxes of documents when the original brewery closed and that they may well be stashed, long-forgotten, in a basement, just waiting to be rediscovered.
Lacking authoritative documents, Deuhs relied on what he considers a massively collaborative effort to discern just what Ballantine’s original was like. From firsthand accounts of those who remember the old beer fondly to occasional clues found in the occasional written record, the master brewer has reconstructed what he and others believe to be as faithful a representation of the original Ballantine as possible.
The new (old) IPA weighs in at 7.2 percent ABV with 70 IBUs. At 14 SRM, its appearance is right in line with today’s popular craft IPAs.
When I asked Deuhs what we can expect next, he stopped short of making any promises, but he did mention a fascination with Ballantine’s original Burton Ale, which was brewed once a year and aged up to two decades before release. I don’t know what I’ll be doing in twenty years, but I bet a Burton Ale would make it considerably better.
Ballantine Six PackBallantine IPA hits the shelves this week in six-packs and limited edition 750 ml bottles. You’ll find it in major markets across the Northeast, including New York, New Jersey, Boston, Portland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Pittsburgh.