How many hazy IPAs are out there? In a nation of roughly 9,700 breweries, the number surely stretches into quintuple digits.
At the start of 2024, hazy IPA represented 12.5 percent of all craft-beer dollars in chain retail. That was up from 10.7 percent the year before, according to data analyzed by 3 Tier Beverages, making it the No. 4 category behind standard IPA, seasonals, and imperial IPA. However, those numbers don’t include the millions more soft, fruity pints poured at bars and taprooms across the country, or those sold to-go from breweries.
Hazy IPA is ubiquitous and widely enjoyed, and it is here to stay.
That means that quality is table stakes for the style—it’s obligatory, or drinkers will look elsewhere. And as hazy IPA becomes commodified, these beers must have a point of view—a fingerprint that marks them as different from the sea of other (often less expensive) options that crowd the shelves and bar menus.
As recently as a few years ago, their haze—which telegraphed fruity aroma, fuller body, and a relative lack of bitterness—was the differentiator. Not anymore. Today, a brewer can purchase a commercial haze-making liquid that imparts no bitterness, no aroma, and no flavor to beer. In this era of haze for haze’s sake, a hazy IPA must stand out from the pack. Otherwise, it’s just another permutation of a style that’s become as commonplace in gas stations as it is in the coolest taprooms.
“With hazy IPAs, I would like to say that we’re all attempting to achieve a certain level of the ideal,” says Lauren Carter Grimm, who owns Grimm Artisanal Ales with her husband, Joe Grimm.
He finishes her thought: “Every brewer has an ideal,” he says, “but it’s not the same ideal for everyone.”
Divergence
When brewers’ visions of the platonic hazy IPA vary, their decisions related to ingredients, process, and equipment will vary as well. And it’s a good thing they do.
In March, Seattle’s Cloudburst said the quiet part out loud in an Instagram post announcing a new hazy IPA called Part of the Decoration. It reads, in part, “On one hand—it’s pretty cool that a fairly new style of beer can take the world by storm in less than a decade, so much so that it’s this inevitable, predictable, mundane option that everybody has access to all over the entire country. On the other—it could make a drinker unenthused, non-committal, fatigued, and jaded … which is not cool … because, uh, this is our jobs? AND OUR LIFE?!”
The truth at the heart of the humor offers a challenge to brewers: Do your hazy IPAs have a signature? Could a drinker take a sip from an unbranded glass and recognize the beer as belonging to a particular brewery? If not, hazy IPA risks becoming a commodity like paper towels or pasta—brands don’t matter, only cost and convenience.
“As hazy IPA becomes so ubiquitous, people are looking at the price and the packaging,” says Steve Luke, Cloudburst’s founder and head brewer. “Is it pretty? Is it cheap? Then I’ll buy that one.”
Luke brews his hazies to be drier—finishing around 1.8°P (1.007), hardly ever using wheat or oats in the grist—as well as more bitter—around 65 IBUs—than most others. That’s because he personally prefers that approach, but it’s also because it sets Cloudburst’s hazies apart. It gives the beers an angle in the market, too: Cloudburst’s hazy IPAs feature on many Seattle-area restaurant menus because their dryness makes them more food-friendly than sweeter versions.
“Because we don’t have a flagship … people can make that educated guess” about a Cloudburst IPA, Luke says. “They know what 90 percent of one of our hazy IPAs is going to taste like.”
Among breweries that focus on hazy IPAs—such as Chicago’s Hop Butcher for the World—that kind of differentiation is a matter of existential necessity.
Jeremiah Zimmer, Hop Butcher’s owner and cofounder, says that creating a “house character” is paramount. He says he hopes that drinkers would describe Hop Butcher’s hazies as being characterized by “bright citrus, ripe tropical, and pleasant dankness.” Those are relatively universal descriptors, so—as with any brewing topic—the devil is in the details. Drinkers likely can’t see or explain it, but Zimmer says it’s his judicious approach to blending hops that offers a singular perspective on the style.
“Not to put too much emphasis on Untappd, but we have people that will say, ‘I’ve never had better, hoppier beers,’ or ‘If you want hoppy beers in Chicago, you have to go here,’” Zimmer says. “And that is fulfilling every time I hear that.”
A unique take on hazy IPA is fulfilling and, amid a murky sea of turbid beers, an absolute necessity.
The Hops Have It
Because many brewers have access to the same fruit-forward, aroma-intensive hop varieties, each brewer’s own way of choosing and using them is what can create a thread that runs through a brewery’s IPAs. For Zimmer, hop selection is the most critical tool for creating the Hop Butcher thumbprint. He says all dry-hop blends need a “lead star,” which is the strong presence of a multifaceted hop that could stand alone in a dry hop. (And the ability to hand-select these hops is a major advantage.)
“There are almost tiers of hops, and I feel like hop suppliers know this, but they need to sell everything,” Zimmer says. “And some brewers are like, ‘I don’t care, that sounds good, let’s do these four [varieties].’ But if you don’t have a leading star, it might be good, but it’s not going to be great.”
For example, he says he wouldn’t dry hop with a blend of Lotus and Denali because neither is a hop he’d use on its own. But Lotus with a heavier dose of Citra? Sure. Sabro-Ekuanot? Nope. But Sabro-Simcoe, heavier on the Simcoe? Yes.
“There are supporting cast members that need to be there if you’re going to make a bunch of hop blends,” he says, “but you’d never single out some of the supporting cast members … because it wouldn’t be great.” He says the presence of a “lead”—that is, a dynamic and stand-alone hop variety—in a dry-hop blend is a major part of Hop Butcher’s hazy IPA modus operandi.
He also suggests a fresh, super-clean pitch of London Ale III yeast—he is particular about that detail. In the past, he says, Hop Butcher has brewed beers with an “absolutely insufficient” dry hop that still resulted in fruity, juicy, expressive flavors because of the high esters from that particular strain. Switching suppliers on the yeast, meanwhile, can create variance not only in the speed of fermentation but in the quality and intensity of ester production.
In Prescott, Arizona, Wren House also has a particular approach to hop selection that unifies its hazy IPAs—including the award-winning Spellbinder.
Head brewer Jake Ainsworth says brewers who can hand-select hops tend to select only for intensity—but that’s a mistake. In contrast, Wren House brewers approach hop selection not necessarily with varieties in mind, but with a desired set of sensory characteristics that define their hazy IPAs across batches and years.
During hop rubbings, they’re less concerned with whether a certain crop of Mosaic is the most Mosaic; instead, they’re asking whether that Mosaic contributes to Wren House’s desired flavor profile for hazies. If it doesn’t, they might select a different hop to create the desired sensory continuity. For example, if the brewers are evaluating Citra, but it doesn’t have the particular puzzle piece they were hoping it would bring to a blend, then they may substitute another hop that does.
“We like to take a qualitative approach during selection and not just check boxes,” Ainsworth says. “It becomes a balanced amalgamation of what we think our hazy IPAs should or could be.”
The Nature of Haze
Though Grimm released its first commercial hazy IPA a decade ago, the brewery still makes incremental improvements. The goal is to achieve what originally drew Joe and Lauren to the style when they tasted early batches of Hill Farmstead’s IPAs—what Joe refers to as a beautiful complexity. That’s what they hope defines Grimm’s hazies as well.
Some of their most critical lessons have been about the nature of haze itself. Working with Laura Burns, Omega Yeast’s R&D director, the Grimms are attempting to better understand what they refer to as the two types of haze: Type A and Type B.
Historically, technical brewing literature has considered haze to be a product of the grist, or a result of dry hops comingling with the grist to create a larger protein-polyphenol complex. That’s Type A haze. Omega and the Grimms have been digging into Type B haze, which occurs when specific yeasts encounter hops.
“It has a different appearance, and it’s not necessarily related to the grain bill in any way,” Joe says. “You can get a hazy appearance with a 100 percent base-malt beer.”
Joe says he believes the hazy IPAs that enchanted him more than a decade ago were brewed with yeasts that create this Type B haze. (Not all New England–style yeasts produce Type B haze; for example, Conan does not.) However, many brewers chasing that hazy appearance have achieved it with more adjuncts and flaked grains, producing Type A haze in a beer that’s more tannic and abrasively starchy.
Grimm’s hazy IPAs, meanwhile, go lighter on the wheat and oats in an effort to produce more of the Type B haze. Joe says that these tend to be slightly more translucent, despite high dry-hop loads, and that they’re less characterized by hop burn and astringency.
Still, it’s still not clear what Type B haze is, biophysically. It could be excreted by the yeast, or it could be activated by dry hopping. Omega Yeast has done sensory analysis to compare two otherwise identical beers—one brewed with yeast containing the gene that produces Type B haze, and the other brewed with yeast that doesn’t. It found little difference between the two. Joe’s conclusion is that Type B haze has no sensory effects beyond its visual presentation, while Type A tends to produce a beer with a more aggressive hop character.
Having their house yeast genetically sequenced has taught the Grimms a lot about its haze production, and that has informed how they brew. Grimm’s brewers serially repitch the house yeast from a top crop; it’s currently on generation 300-plus. At some point last year, however, Joe and Lauren noticed that their hazy IPAs appeared to be losing their haze more quickly that before. Genetic sequencing showed that the house yeast had stopped producing the gene responsible for Type B haze; as a result, the IPAs were displaying only Type A haze. So, last fall, they re-upped their house yeast from a banked supply, and voilà, it began producing the desired Type B haze again. This is important to the beers’ appearance as well as their attenuation: Grimm’s house yeast attenuates beers more fully and quickly as its generation count rises.
“Our yeast is adapting to our equipment and our processes, and in turn we are also adapting to our yeast,” Lauren says. She describes a “symbiotic loop” that wouldn’t be possible if the brewery were repitching fresh yeast every batch or two.
From Differentiation to Evolution
While there’s much still to be learned about haze, its chemical nature, and how it sensorially translates given the variables inherent in different beer recipes, what’s happening at Grimm, Hop Butcher, Cloudburst, and elsewhere signals exciting possibilities for the style.
It points to a future where yeast and other ingredients combine to form something greater than the sum of their parts: hazy IPAs that are products of specific breweries, bearing signatures that no one else could copy.