Almost every one of America’s roughly 8,000 breweries makes an IPA. The challenge to create IPAs that stand out from thousands of competitors is a daunting one for any brewery. It’s an even taller order for new breweries that don’t have the hops contracts, relationships with suppliers, or the industry cachet to source the most in-demand varietals.
Wilmington, North Carolina’s New Anthem Beer Project had a vision for its IPAs, though, and wasn’t about to let its early struggles to source Citra or Nelson Sauvin derail its plans. After just three and a half years, New Anthem’s outside-the-box approach to hops sets its IPAs well apart from the pack and proves an old adage true: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Cofounded by Bill Hunter and Brewer Aaron Skiles in 2016, the brewery was already used to working around roadblocks. Its brewpub’s building, formerly home to the last operating commercial livery stables in Wilmington, was built just after the turn of the century—and apparently its plumbing was, too. Four-inch cast-iron pipes had been dry for so long they disintegrated, leaving only holes in the brick walls and piles of iron flakes. Just a few years later, Hurricane Florence nearly sunk the brewery, and not with water or winds. Contractors were so tied up repairing or rebuilding damaged homes after the storm that construction on New Anthem’s 17,000-square-foot production brewery and taproom was delayed again and again, pushing back production and threatening to wreck business plans. But Skiles and Hunter recognized that getting neighbors out of tarp-covered homes was more important than their brewery, and they tightened belts enough to ride out the delay. That production facility finally opened in August 2019, adding about 5,000 barrels of annual capacity.
It appears that New Anthem is hitting its stride. Its IPAs have drawn wide acclaim, though they’re only distributed in North Carolina. The production facility should provide the brewery space to finally launch its mixed-fermentation program and make use of 5,000 square feet worth of spirits barrel–aging space. And, not to be overlooked, the brewers finally have access to the best-quality hops they can buy.
“As we’ve gotten bigger, I’ve made a point that that’s the biggest thing we need to advocate for,” Skiles says. “Through that process, we’ve developed relationships with some farms and some vendors, and now we’re able to secure ourselves some select varietals.”
Those varietals, though, aren’t necessarily the hyped ones you’d expect. Skiles quickly sings the praises of the Centennial hops he gets from Crosby Hop Farms; New Anthem uses Centennial in both Rusty Cage, a 50-50 Citra-Centennial pale ale, and Bluebird, a 100 percent Centennial-hopped hazy IPA, one of the brewery’s best sellers. Until he began asking better questions of his vendors, Skiles admits he wasn’t always getting what he wanted out of certain hops. Centennial could taste grungy. High-alpha-acid Columbus was often too rough. A batch of Citra the brewery bought early on was so raw in its flavor, New Anthem stopped brewing predominantly Citra-hopped beers. Now, Skiles says he’s better educated and able to get better-quality hops, but thinking beyond only the most fashionable ones has helped New Anthem’s beers to shine.
The New Anthem production team tastes through beers in the new production brewery taproom. Cofounder Aaron Skiles is third from left.
“Centennial is powerfully aromatic. The lemon, the floral, the really strong grapefruit out of it—it’s just a nostalgic hop,” Skiles says. “Columbus is the same way. Early-crop Columbus, that stuff is spectacular. Being able to make fun, clever beers that thread a needle between a flavor that you had eight years ago and a flavor and a mouthfeel you know now, it’s pretty cool.”
Those Centennial flavors—instantly recognizable yet underutilized in hazy IPAs—are part of what distinguishes New Anthem’s IPAs from a sea of competitors. But that doesn’t mean the brewery doesn’t accidentally seem to repeat itself at times.
“We’ve had some instances where people are like, ‘Oh, this beer tastes similar to this one,’ and it’s three different hop combinations, but I’ll be like, ‘Shit, it sure does taste the same,’” Skiles says. “So we pick one of the two and don’t make the other anymore. It’s just fitting puzzle pieces together, finding good hop combinations and ratios.”
New Anthem also has experimented with brewing IPAs with one hop varietal on the hot side and another hop varietal on the cold side, or one varietal on the hot side and a trio of dry-hop varietals. (Skiles is especially enamored with using Citra in the boil.) With almost eight pounds of total hops per barrel in those IPAs, Skiles says drinkers might expect a bit of hop harshness. But the hot-cold hopping duality has the effect of softening some of those rough edges. Even in its super juicy IPAs, New Anthem doesn’t shy away from hop bitterness, which Skiles credits as another distinguishing characteristic of his IPAs.
“We have a threshold that we try to achieve for bitterness depending on our starting gravity. Depending on the gravity of the beer, sometimes it’s upwards of an 80–85 IBUs charge on a double IPA, and you really can’t tell a whole lot of difference in the overall bitterness of that beer,” Skiles says. “You may get less of the polyphenols when you put a little burn on the front end.”
Hop flavors and bitterness are, of course, expected variables for breweries to tinker with when brewing IPAs. But Skiles also spends a lot of time thinking about carbonation, malts, and fermentation profiles, aspects of IPA brewing that sometimes go underappreciated. He says that a move away from flaked grains toward majority malted grains, especially oats, has vastly improved the lautering process and retained an oat flavor that he prefers. In terms of yeast, New Anthem has brewed some beers with kveik yeast and California Ale yeast but now uses the Boddingtons strain almost exclusively. Skiles also mentions four to five lager yeasts the brewery toys around with. While he’d love more drinkers to know his brewery for its lagers—which the brewery has begun fermenting under pressure with spunding valves—he can’t help but shrug a bit. The success of New Anthem’s IPAs tends to eclipse its other beers.
“We knew we’d have to make predominantly IPAs,” he says. “We just didn’t realize quite how heavy that focus was going to be. We make some bangin’ stouts and some bangin’ lager beers!”
This year, the production facility will allow New Anthem to produce roughly five times the beer it did in its brewpub in 2019, allowing it to spread its wings both stylistically and geographically. While it will no doubt continue to be hop-dominant, the brewery hopes to prove itself in terms of lagers, saisons, fruited mixed-fermentation beers, and barrel aging as well.
As Skiles reflects on the lessons learned over his brewery’s first few years, they all come back to a similar refrain: quality raw ingredients.
“We’ve brewed 75 or 80 IPAs since we’ve been open, and in a 10-barrel brewpub, we’ll brew one and not brew it again for four months,” he says. “It did give us an opportunity to get consistent raw materials and understand what it takes to make an all-Citra beer or an all-Centennial beer that’s consistent. I think drinkers can taste the difference.”
Photos: Courtesy New Anthem beer project