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Gipsy Hill 27 April 2016
Hot off the press, New England IPAs are awesome. Everyone’s writing about it. What are they? Why are they different? Can I get one? They’re a new style of IPA, they’re super hazy, low bitterness, really big flavour in a juicy way, and no, not yet anyway…
About a year ago I was poking about on instagram and came across a photo of a pint of beer I’d never seen before – it was totally opaque. Until then opaque beer was for failed homebrews and pioneering un-fined cask producers. Even an example of either of those wasn’t as opaque as this beer. I almost brushed it off as nonsense, but read the beer review: “Wow! Like sticking your nose into a bag of fresh mango with pineapple on the side, then taste is like sucking on oranges mixed with citrus plum.” Have you ever heard of a beer described like that?
Dig deeper and you get to the bottom of this movement: Trillium, Treehouse, Bissell Bros, Alchemist, Lawsons, Maine, Night Shift, Tired Hands, Other Half, Grimm…more I don’t even know about. They’re all doing it, these juicy, hazy hop bombs. All sold straight out of the breweries or really limited distribution in state, forget about export to UK.
So then how do we research this? Obviously you befriend a helpful east coast instagrammer who’s posting about these kind of beers and ask him politely to hook you up. Thanks so much mate. Three weeks later we received a care package of East Coast specialities that blew our respective minds. The most incredible part of it was how much they lived up to the hype – pours pure haze, tropical aroma you can smell from across the room and then literal Tropicana on your tongue.
There was only one thing to do after that – have a go! We did.
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