Ales: India Pale Ale

Related tangentially to pale ales, the India Pale Ale (IPA) has become, along with America's love affair with hops, one of the more popular styles in the craft beer explosion. The back story of the India Pale Ale style is that English brewers made a high-alcohol, high-hops version of their regular pale ales for shipment to colonial troops and administrators in India, since hops and alcohol both act as preservatives. There has been some doubt lately cast about the veracity of this legend. The style languished until being revived by craft brewers over the last two decades. An IPA in its basic form tends to be a medium amber in hue and very bitter, although the form the bitterness takes depends on the variety of hops used. Two major trends in IPA's have surfaced recently. One is a "race to the top" in the use of hops. Brewers have been trying to outdo each other with the hop content of their beers, coming out with beers with IBU's (International Bitterness Units) creeping upward from a respectable 40-45 to 70 to (the highest I've seen) 104 by Lagunitas. I've been told by a local brewer that you can't increase actual bitterness without limit, that eventually you reach a point where adding additional hops have no effect. As I mentioned before, the way the bitterness is expressed varies. Some high hop content IPA's are very smooth, while others taste like you could remove paint with it! The other trend is where brewers call everything an IPA. A hoppy red ale is a Red IPA; you have Black IPA's, Belgian IPA's; IPL's (India Pale Lagers) and who-knows-what-else. This is mainly to capitalize on the IPA's popularity, and it tells you, for instance, that a black IPA is a beer that tastes like an IPA but is dark in color. Low or medium bitter ales with a lower alcohol content are being touted as "session IPA's" (a session beer is one with a lower alcohol content, enabling one to drink more of them in one drinking session) - but to my way of thinking they're just pale ales under another name.