Winter can be a hard time for beers. Wheat beer droops, big dark boomers surge back to the top. It’s a different world for beer, winter is. We all talked about how hard seltzer wasn’t going to make it through its first winter, and it did take a good thumping, but it’s still around. For now.
One of the latest breweries to dabble in the Cold IPA fad, Pike Brewing / ig/@pikebrewing
But Cold IPA? Like hard seltzer, it’s probably been around longer than you realized; the first one was released just about four years ago. Since then we’ve seen some big talk about it, some big arguments about what it is and isn’t…but now may be the winter of its discombobulation. Pour yourself something hoppy and let’s consider the future of Cold IPA.
Did we really need another IPA? Because we’ve already lived through all kinds of IPAs: American; Session, West Coast, East Coast, English, Imperial, Double, Triple, and of course Quadruple; Black, White, Blue, Green, and Red; Single Hop, Cryo Hop, Hop Blend, Fresh Hop, Estate Hop, Wild Hop, Organic Hop, and Zero-Hop (that was a weird one); New England, Hazy, Juicy, DDH, 3DH, No-Boil; Rye, Wheat, Rice, Oat, Corn, Spelt, Triticale; Belgian-style, Brett, Pepper, Fruit, Lactose/Milkshake, Pastry/Pie, Coffee, Tea, Sour, and, yes, inevitably, Pumpkin.
Holy shit, right? I probably missed some; I don’t have all day here. Admittedly, some of these were purely stunt IPAs: the color ones in particular never really caught on, Zero-Hop was I-dare-you experimental, and the spelt and triticale were never going to be big.
There was also Brut, but… “We Don’t Talk About Brut.” We’re going to have to, though, because the failure of Brut IPA is key to why I think Cold IPA is not going to last. Or maybe it isn’t, but we’re still going to talk about it, because it pisses me off.
Let me be clear: Brut IPA does not piss me off for boomer reasons, or ‘Angry Old Brewer’ kinds of reasons. Brut pisses me off because the very first one I had, in July of 2018, was from Dirty Pretty Brewery in Portland, and it really impressed me. “Magic,” I said on Untappd. I still remember drinking it, I was at Loyal Legion with an old friend and his son. I only remember the really good – or really bad – beers that specifically.
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And that’s what pissed me off. Because it was so good, I tried every other Brut IPA I saw for a while…and not one of them was any good. They were maybe kind of dry, but none of them had that incredibly anti-gravity hop character. That was the whole key to…
