We’re no strangers to pale ale at Firestone Walker, even if we’ve become better known in recent years for IPAs, crisp blondes and lagers, and various barrel-aged creations. Yet we still love to brew and drink pale ale, arguably the foundational beer of American craft. So, we’re excited to get back into that game in 2024 with Firestone XPA—a modern, West Coast–style pale ale inspired partly by our friends Down Under, where the extra pale ale style maintains a strong following.
We designed this beer after stepping back and surveying the arc of American pale ale over the past 40-plus years. The primary flashpoint there, obviously, was the launch of the iconic Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in 1981. The best early examples had some beautiful caramel-malt flavor and pronounced hop character while avoiding aggressive bitterness. They essentially riffed on English pale ale, adding a distinctly American twist with Cascade or other Pacific Northwest hops.
Our first entry in this genre was Windsor Pale Ale in 1998, just a couple of years after we opened, and it fell in line with the prevailing style. However, a few years later, we reformulated Windsor into Firestone Pale Ale—which later became Pale 31. For us, that reformulation was a distinct stylistic shift: We were relying less on caramel malt, and we were dry hopping to amplify the hop aromas and flavors. Let’s call it “pale ale 2.0”—we were among the first, but certainly not the last, to advance this drier, more hop- forward style of pale ale.
But a funny thing happened as pale ales got leaner and hoppier—the lines were blurring with the increasingly popular West Coast IPA style. By the time session IPA began to crowd into the lower-ABV space, pale ales started to get lost in the shuffle. We still loved to brew and drink them, but IPA was cannibalizing pale ale from a sales standpoint.
We finally pulled the plug on Pale 31 in 2018, two decades into our pale-ale journey. We were proud of it—that was our most award-winning beer—but demand had simply dried up. The crush of IPAs, including our own, had turned Pale 31 into an afterthought among our customers. Here’s how our cofounder David Walker put it at the time: “Pale 31 has been put out to pasture simply because the American palate it helped awaken has decided this style is not for them. Let’s hope they come full circle, and we can dust off the spellbook and create this beautiful creature once more.”
Well, here we are, blowing the dust off our pale-ale grimoire and conjuring up the XPA. However, this is no Pale 31 clone. We see it as part of the next evolution, which is already ongoing, and what we might call “pale ale 3.0”—a growing wave of hop-forward, West Coast–style pale ales that are crisper, drier, and more drinkable than ever before. That’s what “extra pale” means to us, as we lean into the XPA phenomenon popularized in Australia.
This recipe includes wheat, in contrast to the Munich and dextrin malts that underscored Pale 31. The lead hops are Mosaic Cryo and Nelson Sauvin T-90s, with the latter lending an appropriate Southern Hemisphere vibe. We find that Nelson’s punchy, tropical, sauvignon blanc character expresses perfectly with Mosaic, creating a sort of trans-Pacific New World magic. And we were delighted when Great American Beer Festival judges seemed to agree, awarding Firestone XPA a bronze medal in the International-Style Pale Ale category this past September.
Where all this leads remains to be seen, but we’re thrilled to again be making pale ale—a real cornerstone of American craft beer—joining our fellow brewers and drinkers in the next phase of its evolution.
Note: Firestone Walker is a media partner of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®.