If you wanted to start a friendly fight a decade and a half ago, you could do it in two words: “black IPA.” And sometimes it wouldn’t remain friendly.
In the late aughts, craft beer was turning toward hops, and IPAs were on their way to becoming the key American style—or, more accurately, the key American family of styles. Their popularity was such that breweries were spinning off variations such as double and triple IPAs, red IPAs, Belgian IPAs, and so on. These sparked their own controversies, but nothing like black IPAs, a style whose very name irritated people. It wasn’t just the oxymoron at the center of the name—black and pale?—that stirred people up. Few seemed to agree about what the style should be, and rival camps formed.
Some breweries were shooting for an optical illusion: tastes like an IPA, looks like a stout. Others thought it should be a bit roasty and that the roast bitterness should battle, cats-in-a-bag-style, with equally punchy, resinous hops. Certain agitators in the Pacific Northwest started making the case that the cats-in-a-bag version was a distinct, local thing that they called Cascadian dark ales (CDAs). No surprise, that just made the debate more contentious.