A bit of a history lesson first. In 1975, when Anchor Brewing savior and previous owner Fritz Maytag decided to make Liberty Ale, he needed to come up with a method for dry hopping because it wasn’t something that was really being done. Open fermentation was all he and the brewery had known, and late-addition hopping wasn’t an established method outside of some folks doing it in casks.
So he would ferment in the open fermentors and then transfer to closed secondary fermentation where the whole-cone hops would go into a mesh bag. When you do it that way, you see diminishing returns. Obviously, in the ensuing decades, it has evolved quite a bit. There are whole new methods to achieve dry hopping and to get the flavors and aromas that we expect from IPAs into the beer.
We evolved in a lot of ways over the years. When we expanded the brewery a few years ago, we installed conical fermentors, and now we only really do our classics and a few small beers in open fermentation—beers such as Steam Beer, our California lager, and others such as porter, Christmas Ale, and Liberty Ale.