Introducing The first Historical IPA mixedpack

For the first time, a series of historical IPAs from different periods in history are all available in a single pack. You can order these online here. I’ve taken a deep-dive into the history of IPA and resurfaced with historically accurate re-creations of IPAs from the years 1754, 1823, 1870 and 1914 to bring you a taste of early versions of this legendary style. Read on below for a summary of each carefully re-created historical beer, some of which were aged for months in oak barrels to simulate the trip to India.

You can listen to a deep-dive into the story of IPA written and narrated by our brewer on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

1754 – Hodgson’s Accidental Discovery

The story begins when George Hodgson, owner of the upstart Bow Brewery in London, offered ship captains from the East India Company a great deal to carry his ale to India. His heavily hopped pale ale not only survived the long, hot sea voyage to India, but accidentally transformed into a refined, balanced ale on the way. Hodgson’s India Pale Ale (IPA) became a sensation among British expats. It dominated the overseas market and became known as a taste of home, establishing IPA as a the drink of a growing empire. Business would be great until Hodgson’s descendants went back on their deal with the captains, raised their prices, and tried to cut out everyone who had helped their business grow.

1823 – Allsopp’s Triumph

The Chairman of the East India Company was angry with the Bow Brewery’s new attitude. He met Samuel Allsopp, a brewery owner from Burton-Upon-Trent, at a dinner party and challenged him to replicate the Hodgson IPA. Allsopp not only replicated it, but improved it. Burton's mineral-rich water, which enhanced the flavor and consistency of his ales, was ideal for brewing IPA. The East India Company supported Allsopp’s and soon he took over the Bow Brewery’s market and helped force them out of business. Allsopp’s brewery would grow from producing a few thousand barrels of ale per year to a quarter million barrels. Burton became synonymous with world-class brewing and the local brewing scene exploded. IPA transformed into a global product, riding the wave of the British Imperial Century.

1870 – The Flavour of Empire

By 1870, IPA was not just a drink but a symbol of British progress and pride. The Industrial Revolution propelled breweries to new heights. Allsopp and his now larger competitor, Bass, were leaders in adopting new technologies. These brewers leveraged steam power, refrigeration, and railroads to mass-produce ale. IPA’s sophisticated, pale appearance, and patriotic marketing made it the drink of the middle and upper classes, celebrated in exclusive clubs. Its identity evolved, becoming a reflection of Victorian ambition and the empire’s zenith.

1914 – The Changing Tastes of a World at War

As World War I loomed, the robust IPA fell out of favour. Economic hardship, war rationing, and changing palates led to the rise of mild ales and lagers. Samuel Allsopp’s great-grandson, Percy, made an ambitious pivot to lager but the project ended in disaster, putting him out of business. IPA made a comeback during WWI because of its patriotic identity but had been reduced from 7% alcohol to 3-5% because there wasn’t enough grain. Britain’s global dominance faded after the war. IPA, the drink most closely associated with it, faded, too. IPA would nearly disappear during the 20th century until it was reinvented during the craft beer boom of the 1990s and 2000s.

Want to learn more about the story of IPA?

You can listen to a deep-dive into the story of IPA written and narrated by our brewer on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

You can read it here.

You can taste it by purchasing it at your local liquor store or order it online here.

The Historical ipa mixedpack no.1

For the first time, a series of historical IPAs from different periods in history are all available in a single pack. You can order these online here. I’ve taken a deep dive into the history of IPA and resurfaced with historically accurate re-creations of IPAs from the years 1754, 1823, 1870 and 1914 to bring you a taste of early versions of this legendary style. These are important years in the life of IPA, and this is their story. While there’s no one on earth old enough to compare these ales to the originals, I think they’re close. But judge for yourself. Here’s what I did for each ale:

• Re-created the water chemistry as it was in each place and time when these ales were brewed by adding the appropriate minerals and salts.

• Re-created or followed the original recipes as they appear in the historical record.

• Fermented with a blend of heritage English yeast strains.

• Grew and dried my own hops to make test batches that compared the potency of this more traditional, manual method of hops processing with contemporary industrial practices and adjusted the recipes accordingly

• Aged the ales representing the years 1754 and 1823 for months in oak barrels in a hot warehouse to simulate the trip to India.

• Added Brettanomyces claussenii to the barrel aged ales post-fermentation (more on this below).

• Carbonated the ales by re-fermenting them in the can rather than force-carbonating with CO2.

• Sourced contemporary ingredients that are as close to the originals as possible.

This project has been years in the making but that’s nothing compared to the centuries it’s taken to get the style to where it is today. So listen on to dive into the world of IPA.

Check out the labels below and read on (or follow the links and listen) to dive into the world of IPA.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

This is an approximately 40-minute read. A 90 second version is available here. If you live in British Columbia, you can order the historical IPA mixed pack online here.

Introduction to the origin of IPA

IPA is the result of a lucky mix of business deals, global wars, unknown microbes, and cultural forces. This article tells the story of its first life, as it rose and fell with the British Empire during the period from roughly 1750 to 1930. IPA would nearly disappear during the mid-20th century before coming back during the craft beer boom, but that’s a story for another time.

History is full of stories of hard-working geniuses whose ingenuity took them on a journey from idea to breakthrough. This is not one of those stories. Most of them aren’t even true, or at least contain as much myth as fact. Like many stories about inventions, this is a tale about how smart, hardworking, and lucky people responded to the randomness of the world as best they could and, when then found something great, held on to it.

The life of IPA began by accident at a small brewery in East London. It’s 1751. The neighbourhood is buzzing with commerce and industry, overcrowded housing, and poverty. It’s also full of breweries. One of these would link up with a global trading power that was founded to help Britain compete with France, Spain, the Netherlands and Prussia for control of global trade and military power.

The chapters are sorted by date, and each date corresponds to a ale in our mixed pack. Let’s begin.

1754: Hodgson’s accidental discovery

This is the original India Pale Ale. It was brewed in London as an extra-strong, extra-hoppy version of a pale ale but found fame in India thanks to a combination of dumb luck and good business sense. There were many English pale ales in India by the 1750s. This is the one that set IPA apart as the famous style we know today.

George Hodgson, owner of the small Bow Brewery next to the River Lea, is the accidental father of IPA. His small London brewery was just upriver from East India Company’s London docks on the River Thames. The East India Company was the largest and most powerful company in the world and was responsible for governing India. Its chairman worked as both corporate boss and governor of a large country with life and death power over his subjects.

England had been exporting ale to India since the 1600s and by the 1750s their export market had reached 1,500 barrels per year. A barrel is 115 litres. That puts the total export market to India at just over 22,000 litres per year. That’s small. Many large breweries weren’t interested in a market of that size. But it was growing fast. Hodgson wanted a piece of it.

He began offering merchant captains advanced credit to ship and sell his ales, giving them product and not asking for payment until 18 months later. That was how long a round-trip to India took on an East Indiaman, one of the lumbering cargo ships used by the East India Company. Many captains took him up on these generous credit terms and soon Hodgson was sending his ale to the other side of the world. He sent several styles at first but one of his recipes, a particularly strong and heavily hopped pale ale, not only survived the trip to India but thrived in the rough conditions that ruined most ales, and most ships.

East Indiamen were sturdy ships built for a rough voyage over stormy seas. They blended elements of merchant and warship designs so they could both transport cargo and defend against pirates. Still, the rough water, hot weather, and constant exposure to seawater degraded their hulls, riggings, and fittings. A typical East Indiaman would only make two or three round-trips before maintenance became so expensive, and operation so dangerous, that the East India Company sold them to captains who would use them for shorter trips.

The journey to India began in winter. This was when the prevailing westerly winds in the North Atlantic helped push ships down the west coast of Africa to Cape Good Hope at the continent’s southern tip. The merchant fleet sailed around the cape and into the Indian Ocean just as the southwest monsoon was beginning, in May and early June. These winds carried the East Indiamen north, over the equator and into Indian ports, and the heat for July.

It was a time when workers most needed a drink. It was also a time when year-old ale, battered by the sea voyage and wilted by a tropical summer, had degraded from a taste of home to one of homesickness.

Much of the ale that arrived in India during the early 1700s was weak, bland, and had off flavours that were stale and paper-like. One could only hope that when the ships returned the next year, the ale they carried would be better.

Ale degrades with time because heat and oxygen break down the bitter and aromatic compounds found in hops into bland and stale ones. Contemporary ale avoids this fate because of plentiful CO2, stainless steel tanks and cold-chain transportation networks. Ale was poured into air-filled wooden barrels until the 20th century, maxing oxidation the norm rather than the exception. Oxidation continued even after packaging as oxygen squeezed through the porous wood. The effect was minimal for short trips around the cool United Kingdom. It was even desirable for some extra strong ales above 10% alcohol. But the long, hot sea voyage to India ruined most ale.

This was the problem that Hodgson’s heavily hopped pale ale solved. It was so heavily hopped, at 20 grams of dried hops per litre, that by the time it arrived in India the intensely bitter ale had degraded into well balanced tipple. It was a relief. A cool pint of ale, cooled by the chemical wizardry of saltpetre, was a lot more refreshing on a sweltering summer day than a glass of brandy, sherry, or claret.

But there was more to Hodgson’s IPA than just a lot of hops. The rough, hot journey also accelerated the ale’s aging process and somehow left it tasting not only less degraded but even better than it did before it left the London docks. Somehow, the trip to India made a five-month-old pale ale taste like a strong kind of aged ale beloved by the British upper-classes whose sons made up a large proportion of the administrators in colonial India.

English breweries had been making strong pale ales throughout the 1700s. These were known interchangeably as October ale or Stock ale, because they were brewed in autumn and aged (stocked) for two years. It was a trend that began in wealthy household breweries during the 1600s. These ales could have up to 15% alcohol and spent one year in barrels and then another in bottles before they were ready to drink. They developed intense and complex flavours as they aged. Hodgson couldn’t have known it at the time but one of the ales he shipped to India, a strong pale ale, would undergo a never-before-seen change that would make it taste like a refreshing cousin of the beloved stock ale.

Hodgson’s ale seems to have benefited from a secret ingredient that thrived in warm barrels rolling on the waves. This secret was likely a microbe called Brettanomyces claussenii that was accidentally introduced into the ale via the barrels Hodgson shipped it in. Brettanomyces claussenii means “British fungus,” though it isn’t a fungus but a type of hardy yeast. And it isn’t just found in England but across the world. Brett. c. as it’s known today lives in wood just like the barrels used to ship ale, among other places. It likes warm, even hot temperatures and has the special ability to eat long chain polysaccharides that regular brewer’s yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae) can’t digest.

It’s entirely possible that Brett. c. woke up during the hot voyage as ale sloshed within the barrels, crept out of the wood, and began to eat the remaining sugars the regular brewer’s yeast left behind. As it did it would multiply, doubling its population at a rate of up to once every ninety minutes, and impart its characteristic stock ale traits.

Written descriptions of the ale’s flavour support this idea. Although no one had yet discovered microbes, we know today that Brett. c. was common in historical English ales. Today, many people associate it with Belgian ales where it remains common. Brewers practically eliminated Brett. from English brewing after the discovery of microbes and the invention of pasteurization in the late 1800s.

Brett. c. is responsible for flavours variously described by Hodgson’s contemporaries as “old,” “stock,” and especially “farmhouse.” It would also make ale taste more “dry,” since there would be fewer residual sugars left to add the mild sweetness common in strong ales. All four of these telltale Brett. c. terms were used to describe Hodgsons’s IPA, just as they were to describe the ales brewers brewed to compete with Hodgson and the stock ales many English expats loved to drink when they were back home.

Hodgson’s pale was well loved ale. It filled the stomachs of happy expats, and the wallets of the East India captains. It turned a good profit for the merchants who sold it. It was the most popular brand in India. Hodgson’s pale ale soon became known as the East India Pale Ale. Other London breweries rushed to copy it, shipping their versions to India in the hope they could get some of Hodgson’s market share. But they had little success.

Hodgson’s early market position and generous credit terms with East India Company captains would help him gain half the of Indian export market. All this happened at a time when the Indian market was on its way to quintupling from 1,500 barrels per year in 1750 to 9,000 barrels per year by the turn of the century. During this time IPA changed from representing a taste of home to the taste of a growing empire. It was a steadfast part of a new social dynamic and developed a romantic appeal as the unofficial flavour of the expatriate experience.

Early colonial populations were overwhelmingly male. They were soldiers, labourers, traders and administrators who sought to establish and defend outposts used for strategic economic and military goals. Women began emigrating to colonies in India once the early male colonists had made them secure. They often came as the wives of officials, merchants, and military officers. Although still heavily outnumbered by men, women were central to the structure and organization of imperial social life by the late 1700s.

The role of women as social, cultural, and even diplomatic organizers and ambassadors was then an informal but critical and recognizable institution. Mixed-gender socializing was much more common in the colonies than in Britain and played a crucial role in building community and providing social and psychological support for small expatriate outposts.

Garden parties, picnics and other outdoor events were, even in the UK, mixed-gender gatherings. Weather in the UK limited social gatherings there to indoors for much of the year, where they were much more likely to be segregated. But the hot climate in India made outdoor events a common year-round occurrence. Mixed social gatherings in the colonies were also more frequent, and focused on fostering a sense of unity rather than on maintaining hierarchy. This was where women and men, military officers, civil servants, and merchants got together to reinforce their common British identity.  

IPA was the flavour of these get-togethers. British expats rarely drank water. Instead, they had tea, coffee, ale, and spirits. As a refreshing alternative to tea and coffee that lacked the intoxicating power of spirits, IPA was the most popular social drink for both men and women. Men appreciated its strong, bitter flavour as masculine traits. Women found it appropriately modest because of its relatively low alcohol content when compared to spirits. It’s connection to home also helped set it apart from tea and coffee which, being imports from other colonies, lacked the patriotic symbolism of the IPA.

Hodgson’s IPA had become the flavour of social life for many among Britain’s ruling classes. His success would outlive him but this good fortune would not continue for his business. Almost seventy years after Hodgson shipped his first barrels of ale to India the new owners of his Bow Brewery, Frederik Hodgson and Thomas Drane made an ambitious business move.

In 1821 they decided to cut out the East India Company, still the largest and most powerful company in the world, so that they could ship and sell their ale themselves. They terminated their generous seventy-year-old credit terms with the East India Company captains, raised their prices by 20%, demanded cash payment up front and cut out the merchants in India who were selling their ale. The captains, the merchants and the Company were furious. They retaliated immediately.

Campbell Marjoribanks, chairman of the East India Company, began to look for a brewer who could replicate the Hodgson IPA. When he found him, he would use the massive resources of the East India Company to push the Bow Brewery out of the market with his new product. Hodgson and Drane expected this and were ready. They owned, by far, the most powerful ale brand in India. They must have anticipated this move by the East India Company and felt sure they would defeat their new rival, whoever that would be. They were wrong.

As with the Hodgson’s East India Pale Ale, the new India Pale Ale supported by the East India Company was the perfect combination of good timing and happy accidents. Within two years, in 1823, a new IPA appeared on the market that was immediately more popular and widely acclaimed as even better than theirs. Sales of Hodgson’s East India Pale Ale steadily declined over the next decade. The brewery faded into obscurity and had closed by mid-century. A new brewer had conquered the seas.

1823: Allsopp’s triumph

The 1823 IPA, known as Allsopp’s IPA or “The Burton IPA,” is the result of an unlikely meeting at a London dinner party between a struggling brewer from the centre of England and one of the most powerful merchant men in the world.

Samuel Allsopp, an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur acquired his uncle’s brewery in Burton-Upon-Trent in the year 1807. It cost £7,000, or about £800,000 today. His uncle’s business had started in the 1740s as private brewery in an inn serving the landlord’s customers. Its ales became so popular that the brewery began supplying other inns and by the late 1700s had become the largest brewery in Burton. Allsopp’s uncle had developed a profitable export business selling strong Burton Ale to the Baltic states but the Napoleonic Wars had cut him off from his clients and put his business in danger.

Napoleon’s Continental System, a Europe-wide trade embargo against the UK, had a major impact on Baltic trade. Allsopp’s uncle wanted out. After Great Britain won a decisive naval victory against Napoleon’s ally Denmark and captured its fleet in September 1807, the young Allsopp seems to have bet that trade with the Baltic nations would re-open. He would have to wait.

Trade remained difficult until Russia lifted its embargo in 1810, but then slowed down again when Napoleon invaded them in 1812. Export to the United States was not an option. England and France had for years been intercepting American merchant ships as each warring country tried to stop its enemy from trading with them. The United States retaliated by attempting to impose and embargo of its own that would eventually culminate in the War of 1812.

Having just spent a large sum of money on acquiring a business that had lost most of its best customers, Allsopp tried to make up his lost export sales in the domestic market. He brewed a pale ale in 1808, perhaps the first in Burton, but it must have been unremarkable because there is no record of its success and the brewery failed to grow sales as he must have hoped.

Meanwhile, the war with France was taking a toll on the public. Inflation and unemployment spiked. Protests and violence against the upper classes and industrial interests spread until the government called in solders to stamp out the unrest. It was a bad time to grow a business. Allsopp was struggling. Then, in 1822, the Russians imposed prohibitive tariffs on English ales just as trade with Russia was starting to pick back up.

All this was not Allsopp’s fault but it was his problem. He tried to solve it by expanding into the most promising market for brewers at the time, India. The brewers with the most success were those in London who were selling to India and Southeast Asia, regions that hadn’t been affected by Napoleon’s blockade, conflict with the United States, or domestic tensions. After a decade and a half of struggle Allsopp packed his bags and went to London to see if he could win some clients in the Indian trade.

The specific details of what happened next are hidden behind the veil of time. Somehow Samuel Allsopp managed to get an invitation to dinner at the home of Campbell Marjoribanks, Chairman of the East India Company. It’s unclear how he got the invitation, but if he managed to get the funds together for what amounts to an £800,000 purchase by the age of twenty-seven, he must have been well-connected. His uncle’s links to maritime trade may have helped.

What the two men discussed remains a mystery but at some point in the evening Marjoribanks produced bottles of Hodgson’s IPA. He expressed his anger at Hodgson for changing his terms so quickly and said that if anyone could replicate Hodgson’s ale, he would make him a wealthy man. Although he was in the business of making strong, sweet ales Allsopp said he could replicate it and brought some bottles back to his brewery in Burton-Upon-Trent.

Allsopp gave a bottle of Hodgson’s IPA to his brewer, Job Goodhead, and asked him if he could replicate it. It wasn’t a particularly difficult task because there were only two ingredients: pale malt and East Kent Goldings hops. The trick was getting the temperature right and keeping it there throughout the brewing and fermenting process.

We can’t be sure what happened next but the legend goes like this: Job poured himself a pint of Hodgson’s bitter ale, raised it to his lips for a sip, and then spat it out in horror. “Yes, I can make this” he is said, “But why would anyone want to drink it?” Then he brewed a test batch in his kitchen using a teapot and, finding the result similar, scaled up production to the brewery.

We can’t be sure just how it happened, but we do know that that first batch of IPA brewed by Allsopp and Goodhead was a success. Allsopp ramped up production later that year, in October 1822, and his first shipment landed in India in 1823 with support from the East India Company.

It’s not clear why Marjoribanks chose Allsopp to counter to Hodgson. There were many London breweries that were both more successful and able to brew at a higher capacity. Perhaps Allsopp, at the end of his rope after fifteen years of struggle, offered generous terms to the East India Company captains. It’s difficult to imagine a struggling brewery offering product on credit, so maybe he competed on price.

If the business case that helped get the deal across the line is uncertain to us today, one thing is clear. The ale was excellent. Better than the Hodgson’s IPA. And like Hodgson’s, the reason was a secret ingredient invisible to the naked eye. It wasn’t an undiscovered microbe but a result of millions of years of history that had produced something special deep within the earth below the brewery.

Burton-Upon-Trent sits in the Trent Valley Basin atop layers of sedimentary rocks formed during the Triassic period 250 million years ago. The water used by Burton brewers fell upon the earth as rain. It filtered through rocks tread upon by dinosaurs like Asylosaurus in the hot English prehistoric, flowed through beds of Keuper marl and gypsum, and past layers of chalk and limestone before collecting in underground springs.

When pumped back to the surface the unique mineral content of this water was ideal for brewing hoppy ales. It is rich in calcium sulfate, enhancing hop bitterness and sharpening flavour. It has high calcium carbonate and magnesium, promoting enzyme activity during the brewing process and supporting yeast metabolism during fermentation. It is also high in sodium and chloride, which are balanced in a way that brings out the sweetness in malt so that it complements the more assertive hop character.

Marjoribanks didn’t know Burton water would have this effect when he approached Allsopp. Allsopp didn’t know it when he asked Goodhead to replicate Hodgson’s IPA. But it didn’t take long for the magical properties of Burton water to transform the city into the brewing capital of the world.

Allsopp’s IPA was a success from the moment it landed in Calcutta. It certainly helped that the first shipment of Allsopp IPA landed at the same time as a spoiled shipment of Hodgson’s. But one bad shipment on its own isn’t enough to dethrone a brewery with market dominance of the kind Hodgson enjoyed. Allsopp’s product had to be consistently better, too. It was. Whether this is because Burton water changed the flavour of a virtually indistinguishable recipe is an open question. What is clear is that Burton water supported healthier yeast, and this may have resulted in cleaner, dryer fermentations that were more consistent and less likely to develop off-flavours.

Allsopp pushed Hodgson out of the Indian market throughout the 1820s and became the new dominant player in Asian market. The struggling brewer was now one of the most successful in the world.

Allsopp’s success inspired other Burton brewers to begin making their own hoppy ales. The timing was ideal. When British victory against Napoleon came in 1815 it created a period of peace and stability where Great Britain dominated the world as the only global superpower. The nation had access to an ever-increasing international market for its product through its vast network of colonies. At home, the agricultural revolution and early stages of the industrial boom that would define the 19th century were well under way. People had work, money, and wanted to buy ale. But peace at home and among empires did not mean a peaceful world.

In India, porters still unloaded cargo by hand in the thick, heavy heat of summer. They received little pay. Banyans, Indian merchants or brokers, served as a liaison between local labour and British agents. The banyans were critical for recruiting and managing a labour force that was both used to working in the hot local conditions and that could scale up during shipping seasons. But they were cut out of the lucrative export trade. British soldiers and their local equivalents hired to serve British interests, sepoys, provided security at the docks. They were paid less than their British counterparts and denied the same opportunities for promotion.

Many Indian banyans, sepoys, and upper classes had adopted British customs like enjoying a cool ale on a hot day. Although British traditions like ale caught on among many of the Indians that worked closely with them, relations between the two groups suffered from underlaying tension.

Colonial officials imposed high taxes and forced many local farmers to grow cash crops, leading to food insecurity. They caused factories to close by imposing rules that permitted only raw textile exports, rather than goods woven into value-added products. While many Indians benefited from their relationship with the British through a growing economy, improved infrastructure, and schools, many more resented a hierarchy that kept them at a disadvantage and failed to respect their culture.

A key flashpoint was the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. It began when sepoys were issued rifle cartridges greased with cow and pig fat. The Hindu and Muslim sepoys had to bite the cartridges open, violating religious bans on eating cows and pigs.

Their commanders refused to replace the offending grease. This indignity combined with grievances about lower pay and worse working conditions to create a rebellion. The rebels received support from disgruntled farmers and textile workers but suffered from fragmented leadership and a lack of coordination. Many Indian princes continued to support the British. Though the rebellion slightly less than a year it created major changes in India.

The British Government dissolved the East India Company’s administration and took over control of region. Their response to the rebellion was a combination of reform and repression, both aimed at preventing it from happening again. But the rebellion accelerated a developing national consciousness among Indians. It would lead, in 1885, to the formation of the Indian National Congress, a political organization that became the voice of the Indian independence movement. 

Though the winds of change swirled in India the monsoon winds remained the same. Cargo ships continued to arrive in July with new shipments of ale just as the hot, busy season was getting underway. Demand soared as the colonial population grew.

Production of IPA increased at a dizzying pace, particularly in Burton-Upon-Trent. The city had been an ale exporting powerhouse in the late 1700s but was a brewing backwater by the time Allsopp brewed his first IPA in 1822. There were, at that time, five breweries producing a combined total of 10,000 barrels of ale per year. That would soon change.

Brewers like Allsopp were lucky that the discovery of the magical effects of Burton water on IPA happened at the beginning of the largest economic boom in history. They also benefited from the recent invention of the coke-fired kiln, which permitted pale malt to be produced at scale for the first time. Brewery production in their city grew steadily to mid-century, then tripled every decade from 1850 to 1880. By then a single Burton brewery, Bass, was producing an annual output of over one million barrels per year on its own, and Great Britain was producing 25% of the world’s GDP.

Allsopp’s brewery continued making popular IPAs long after his death in 1838. His brewery never achieved the market dominance Hodgson enjoyed because of competition from other, larger, Burton breweries like Bass. Although he finally achieved financial success, Allsopp’s legacy is not money but the resurrection of the Burton brewing industry and a massive boost in the popularity of IPA both throughout the empire and at home. When the British Empire reached its peak in the last third of the 19th century the IPA had become the flavour of an empire.

1870: The Flavour of Empire

It was a time of excitement, disruption, and progress. Wealth sailed over distant oceans, carried in the holds of the world’s largest merchant fleet. London built the world’s first subway in 1863 and within two decades the telegraph then telephone were invented along with the phonograph, typewriter, lightbulb, internal combustion engine, fountain pen, electric streetcar, camera and alternating current motor. The tide of Modernity was washing over the Old World, still visible everywhere but clearly passing away. IPA was the flavour of this new world order.

The best brewers embraced technology, boosting production, consistency, and quality for their global brands. Samuel Allsopp’s son, Henry, had modernized his brewery and increased annual production to hundreds of thousands of barrels per year. He was in fierce competition with Michael Bass, another innovative Burton brewer.

The two men were among the first to use steam power in brewing. Steam plants powered pumps and mills, elevators, and conveyors, making their breweries run more quickly and consistently as if guided by the hands of invisible workers. They built private railroad sidings connected to the national network to quickly get their products to port and around the country. Bass even used mechanical refrigeration, allowing him to brew high-quality ales year-round, and leveraged scientific brewing methods by employing chemists to study fermentation.

These advancements allowed brewers to produce far more than the export market required. And this was an export market without equal. It was the kind that allowed Michael Bass to maintain a stock of IPA that covered three floors, each two acres in size containing 30,000 barrels of ale apiece, right in the middle of London.

It was the height of the British Imperial Century. It was the peak of the Industrial Revolution. The world was enjoying the security of the Pax Britannica and the UK was the world’s largest economy and unrivaled military power. IPA was now just as popular at home as it was abroad. It represented progress and national pride. Women returning from colonial postings brought with them an appreciation for IPA and more relaxed ideas about both female alcohol consumption and participation in public life.

Women’s role in the social cohesion of the empire had grown to become more formal by the height of the Victorian period. While the predominant role of women in the empire remained domestic, including the meticulous re-creation of British households and the organization of social gatherings, some women worked outside the home.

Women now worked in formal public roles including administrative, clerical and missionary work, education, and medical care. Some become entrepreneurs running inns and small shops, others took over management of plantations, farms, and estates when the men were absent or had died. Others engaged in science and ethnography or social reform advocacy, like fighting for improved conditions for colonial workers and an end to child marriage in areas where that was common.

These opportunities for leadership combined with a growing popularity for travel literature written by British women to give them a public voice that was heard both in their expatriate communities and back home. The experiences and success of women living more independent lives than they could expect on the British Isles challenged the perception of women as suitable only for private roles. This created new expectations for women’s capabilities and helped inspire suffragettes and intellectuals to push for greater equality.

Women from the colonies, who would often have enjoyed a pint of IPA with men, were no longer willing to accept the limited and submissive roles they had left behind when they went overseas. Theirs was a new, sophisticated perspective and it provided cautious inspiration for women back home.

Ever a mirror to the society that produced it, the pale, clear appearance of IPA was by now considered a sign of sophistication when compared to hazy and dark traditional ales. This, combined with its exotic origin story, association with expanding British influence and positive change gave it the reputation as a status drink.

British GDP grew by 150% from 1840 to 1870, creating a middle class thirsty for the taste of progress. Breweries like Bass and Allsopp tailored their marketing to reinforce this message by tying their brand to their nation’s glorious rise to power and, crucially, its people’s hope for the future. To understand the difference between the way people in the UK viewed IPA and other ales all a person had to do was compare what was on tap at the pub and in the club.

The pub was the heart of the community for working-class men in Britain and ale was the blood that pumped through its veins. Pub is the short form of this institutions full name, Public House. It was a space open to anyone, although except for some rural pubs anyone did not include women. Their presence at many rural and nearly all urban pubs back home in the British Isles would be a scandal.

Working men often collected their wages at the pub, where they also settled debts, organized mutual aid societies, and held informal meetings that sometimes evolved into more structured entities like trade unions or activist groups. Pubs were also entertainment centres where men could play games like darts and billiards, creating a lively and, the later it got in the day, rowdy atmosphere.

Men gathered in pubs to unwind after long hours in factories, mines, or at the docks. Ale was viewed as a nourishing, responsible beverage for the respectable Victorian man because it contained less alcohol than spirits, but those were on offer, too. Pub goers had traditional tastes for dark ales like porter and its stronger cousin, stout, because these were seen as more nourishing than light coloured ales. Mild ales were popular, too. Their low flavour and low alcohol made them the choice ale among men who intended to drink a lot. IPA was much less common here. The high hopping rates made it expensive. For the working class, it was a patriotic drink for special occasions, if at all. IPA was not a drink for the pub, but the club.

Middle class men spent their leisure time in clubs. These were private spaces and their membership was restricted to men with similar social or professional status. Young men joined clubs to network with older men whose graces they would need for a successful middle-class career. Doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs frequented clubs that offered a refined and exclusive environment for the upwardly mobile. They also offered an opportunity for men to better themselves in the best Victorian self-help tradition. Members discussed politics, conducted business, and used their club’s private libraries for intellectual pursuits or even to attend lectures. Ale, in particular Bass or Allsopp’s IPA, was the drink of choice in the club.

The idea that IPA was a sophisticated, premium, and patriotic drink for an ambitious nation helped it gain market share from traditional ales, particularly in urban areas of the UK. It was the favourite among young people and the middle- and upper-class, who could afford bottled ale to take home. This aspirant class saw traditional ales, with their malty aroma, sweet thick palate, and sometimes warming, high alcohol content, as archaic. They were for stogy geezers, backwards country folk and labourers. Even members of the Temperance Movement, a group who wanted to reduce or even ban alcohol consumption, supported IPA because it was less intoxicating than stout porters, stock ales, and spirits. All this was a bit off-putting for working-class pub goers who felt patronized and couldn’t afford IPA anyway.

The demand for IPA, and their key ingredient hops, was at an all-time high around 1870. Unfortunately for British hops producers a hop blight caused by fungal diseases like downy mildew and powdery mildew hit the UK at the same time. Brewers needed to import hops from Europe and even North America. The result was that IPA now used a blend of hops, creating new flavour combinations.

IPA had become a truly global ale. It had global ingredients, but a ferociously British identity. Marketing had become a key part of the brewing business. The growing middle-class was a huge market and whoever could capture a piece of it would be rich. This is where Michael Bass beat Henry Allsopp.

Bass leveraged technology more quickly and to better effect than Allsopp. By 1870 he was producing roughly four times as much ale. This does not diminish Allsopp’s success, since he was at the same time personally producing twenty-five times more ale than all of Burton-Upon-Trent in the year his father sent his first shipment of IPA to India in 1823. It did, however, allow Bass more time and resources to cultivate the aura of an ideal Victorian gentleman.

There is no reason to doubt that Michael Bass was anything less than the personification of Victorian ideals, nor that he let this go unnoticed. He was a philanthropist who donated public parks, swimming baths, libraries, a church, and a hospital to the people of Burton and Derby, where his business was based. He showcased his innovative brewing technology at world exhibitions, pitching his brewery as a model of British technological advancement. He was also a Member of Parliament for thirty-five years where he helped advance popular causes like the abolition of debtors’ prisons while supporting labourers in their efforts to reduce oppressive working hours.

Bass showed good character in private, too. He worked hard to improve the working conditions of his thousands of employees and turned down offers to become a baron and then a peer, preferring to remain a commoner. His famous red triangle logo, one of the world’s first registered trademarks, was synonymous with quality and British progress. To have a pint of Bass IPA was to hold the best of the modern world in your hand.

That was a tough act to follow. Henry Allsopp was himself an impressive man but in contrast to Bass he was a quiet old-school gentleman from an age that was fading away. Like Bass, Allsopp was a philanthropist but preferred to donate to local charities and infrastructure projects as one donor among several. While it may have been his preference to donate in a less ostentatious way, he was not afraid of status symbols. He became a member of parliament in 1874 and purchased a stately manor home, Hindlip Hall, as a legacy for his family. He accepted a baronetcy upon his retirement from the House of Commons and in 1886 was elevated to the peerage to become the first Baron Hindlip.

Henry Allsopp was a successful and generous family man. He was an ideal citizen of the Old World but his life and brand did not reflect the excitement, progress, and appetite for social change that Victorians craved. It was a brand people were proud of and a part of British history. But it was not a brand for the future and that’s where the aspiring Victorian masses had cast their gaze.

1914: The Changing tastes of a world at war

Dark clouds began to form on the once bright horizon as the British Empire sailed toward the end of the twentieth century. The self-confident Victorian period ended with a pang of uncertainty and tension. A growing awareness of inequality, industrial exploitation, and militarization of empire challenged the long-standing belief in British moral and economic progress.

Doubt and anxiety had taken root in the social consciousness by the early twentieth century. Hope and pride began to fall out of fashion, particularly after the brutality of the Boer War that killed four times as many women and children as enemy combatants. The big, assertive IPA was for a swaggering empire. As that empire’s moral and military dominance waned so too did the ale most closely associated with it.

The humbler pallets of the early 1900’s century began to prefer mild ales and a fashionable new continental style, lager, was gaining popularity in the UK. New taxes on alcohol made these cheaper alternatives to the now even more expensive IPA. Lager, with its sparkling clarity and crisp, clean flavour, had the refined look and feel of an IPA. It also fit the mood, lacking both the in-your-face imperial swagger of IPA and the folksy connotations of mild ale. Lager was for cautious palates that, like cautious minds, sought shelter from the swirling winds of change.  

Culture could not keep pace with economic and technological progress. Rapid industrialization created poverty and isolated working people from traditional rural and community ties. It also created decadence and wealth that sheltered the well-to-do from the struggles of most of their compatriots.

The age of machines restructured the work force and stoked fever dreams about dystopian futures where humans lost control of their own creations. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are famous examples of society’s preoccupation with a degenerate future where the bill for indulgence, moral decay and unchecked technological progress would come due. It wouldn’t take long for reality to write a darker story.

Percy Allsopp, son of Henry and grandson of Samuel, was an early British adopter of lager. Nearly all lager consumed in the UK was imported from Germany and none was brewed domestically. After nearly eighty years of success with his family’s famous IPA he made a bold pivot and switched most of his production to lager. His decision captivated the brewing world.

Percy ordered an expensive, custom-made lager brewery from the United States that integrated the latest advances in brewing technology. His aim was to be the first British brewer to produce lager at-scale, with a planned output of at least 50,000 barrels per year. His grandfather had won massive success with a similar pivot in 1823 when he switched from strong, sweet traditional ales to crisp, bitter IPA in 1823. Percy’s new lager brewery was purchased for £8,000, or £2,900,000 today, and commissioned in 1899. It was a disaster.

The eager eyes of a thirsty public watched as his new equipment failed to perform as planned, causing the loss of early batches to spoilage. Percy was losing money almost as fast as his brand was losing respect. He suffered from bad press, including a newspaper article entitled How to Lose a Million, and resigned in 1900. By 1914 he was bankrupt and the Allsopp family was out of the brewing business six years later.

Bass and other large Bruton breweries including Worthington & Co. and Thomas Salt & Co. continued to produce IPA while also making the traditional darker ales that were slowly regaining popularity. This was not the same world that rewarded brash moves of the kind Samuel Allsopp made in 1823. The cautious wait and see approach other breweries took regarding lager would soon pay off in the most emphatic and terrible way.

The British Empire, the global naval superpower, was locked in an arms race with an ascendant German Empire, now master of the world’s largest army. Britain’s European allies were nervous. Some saw war as the inevitable result of the tension between Britain and Germany. Others thought that globalization had made war so preposterously expensive as to be impossible. All eyes were on Kaiser Wilhem II, an unstable man whose emotions whipsawed between love of his late British grandmother Queen Victoria and hatred of her daughter, his mother, for giving birth to him with a physical deformity.

On July 28, 1914, an assassin’s bullet ended the life of an Austrio-Hungarian prince and shattered a delicate peace. The murder of Frans Ferdinand by a Serbian Nationalist provided an excuse for Wilhem II to invade Belgium. The Pax Britannica was finished. Britain declared war on Germany to defend its ally.

The Imperial Century faded in the haze of artillery fire as the Victorian dream of unlimited progress was replaced by nightmares of the industrial-scale slaughter of early mechanized warfare. This was the year when the best blood of a generation of young European men would begin pour from their shattered corpses and soak into the anguished mire of the Western Front.

German lager was suddenly unpopular in the UK. British styles surged with wartime patriotism and the IPA made a comeback. But it had changed to reflect the times. War rationing restricted the ingredients available. The volume and variety of international goods declined as German U-boats preyed on merchant shipping as part of a strategy to starve the UK into submission.

U-boats hunted in Rudel, or wolfpacks in English. This was a strategy where one U-boat would spot a merchant convoy and trail it at a distance while relaying its position to other submarines. These would all converge on the convoy from different angles, usually at night, and attack in coordinated waves. Many defenseless convoys were annihilated. Those escorted by destroyers hardly fared better. At their peak, U-boat attacks sank 516 ships in a single month.

Ale now needed to be produced with domestic ingredients but there weren’t enough available for traditional recipes. The government had put restrictions on the use of grain to prevent starvation. The IPA dropped from over seven percent alcohol to between three and five percent. Barley malt was so sparse that brewers had to use adjuncts like flaked corn and invert sugar to boot their ales to their new, weaker strength, even when accounting for a massive drop in production overall. U-boats had cut Britain off from its export market, drastically reducing demand for IPA. But IPA wasn’t the British exclusive it used to be.

The New World had developed a taste for hops and was satisfying its own demand. Alexander Keith was making a famous IPA in Nova Scotia. IPA made up three-quarters of John Labatt’s sales in Ontario and Québec the 1890s. The independently minded United States was not as fond of IPA as their Canadian neighbours but still produced some at scale, including Ballantine IPA in New Jersey and Amsdell IPA in New York, the New World’s largest hop growing region at the time.

North America’s massive agricultural prowess meant that New World brewers weren’t affected by marauding U-boats. Still, IPA became light there, too. A hop blight in 1909-1910 combined with the pre-prohibition push for lighter ales in the United States to dial down New World IPA strength to similar levels as on the British Isles. But this blight, the second major disruption to hop supplies in living memory, would plant the seeds of an IPA resurgence a century later.

A hop breeding program at Wye College, London, that had started in 1904 was suddenly interesting across the Atlantic. It was even replicated by other hop breeding programs in Europe and North America. Their initial goal was increased disease resistance but the eventual result would be hundreds of new, highly flavourful and aromatic hops that future generations would one day enjoy.

Britain suffered after its victory in the Great War. It had exhausted its resources defending itself and its allies, and its imperial decline accelerated. Other empires, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottomans collapsed and were carved-up, while Russia succumbed to paranoid and murderous revolutionaries. The Age of Empire was over.

Britain entered a period of accelerated, but still gradual, social change. Women had entered the workforce while men were fighting overseas. Their work as clerks, factory workers and bus drivers provided a large-scale example of female independence in Britain that had until then only been possible in the colonies. Though men would take back these jobs when they returned from the war, women had emphatically shown they were capable of more than society presumed.

Working class men, whose spilled blood had mixed in the trenches with that of their wealthy compatriots, also gained respect. An act of parliament in 1918 extended voting rights to the male working class and to about forty percent of women. Housing reforms improved the living conditions of the working class beginning in 1919 and unemployment insurance was available in 1920.

Wartime economic disruption had left scars on the economy. Britain’s export market receded along with the disposable income of everyday people. Small breweries had struggled during the war and many larger ones purchased them at a discount once it was over. This was the beginning of what would be a decades-long period of consolidation in the brewing industry.

The big producers were eager to get back to profitability during the 1920s. They leaned-in to the resurgent popularity of the affordable mild ale, producing it at scale and making it even more affordable than it already was. People began to look to the future with hope once more and embrace innovation. Even lager began to make a cautious return to British pubs. The Victorian era was history. As it faded into memory over the next several decades so too would its most famous ale, the IPA.

Though socializing over a pint with men had enhanced women’s autonomy during the colonial period, alcohol had a net-negative effect on women. Men, with their higher tendency to drink excessively and pre-disposition to rowdiness and violence, presented a continued challenge to social and domestic harmony. These dark traits fed on the pain of war and financial insecurity until they stumbled from the shadows and fell before the gaze social reform. Though the early temperance movement advocated a shift from spirits to ale, the woman-dominated early twentieth century incarnation opposed all forms of liquor. The moral logic of temperance and the economic logic of producing cheap ales conspired to create what would be a decades-long trend of light ales.

North America was meanwhile experiencing an industrial and demographic boom. Population doubled between 1890 and 1930 as the once British colonies filled with immigrants from around the world. Canadian breweries suffered from a brief period of prohibition between 1916 and 1918, a result of a combination of temperance politics and wartime grain conservation efforts. Québec repealed prohibition in 1919 and other provinces followed suit throughout the 1920s, creating a regulatory patchwork where only the largest breweries survived. This set off a period of consolidation where, like in the UK, ales became both mass-produced and mild, while small breweries disappeared. 

Prohibition was much harsher in the United States. It lasted from 1920 to 1933 at an immediate direct cost of 75,000 jobs in the brewing industry along with thousands of indirect job losses, including the loss of the hop industries of New York State and Vermont. Of the roughly 1,300 breweries in the USA in 1920 only 300 remained operational by the time prohibition was repealed, having survived on the manufacture of sodas and other non-alcoholic beverages. After prohibition the largest breweries underwent a period of consolidation like they did in the UK and Canada, wiping out smaller breweries and producing large quantities of cheap ales.

Very few New World IPAs survived prohibition in the United States, with Ballantine remaining as one of the only examples from the pre-prohibition era. IPA fared much better in Canada, with Alexander Keith continuing to produce at scale, particularly on the East Coast, and Labatt supplying both the French and English markets further west. Some Canadian breweries even supplied ale to the USA in secret while it was outlawed there. But these weren’t the IPAs of old. They were clean, crisp, light ales that resembled slightly hoppier versions of the new dominant global style, lager.

Afterword

The decades that followed would be hard on IPA. It would become a nearly forgotten style until generations later. The craft beer boom would revive the name IPA, but this was a new post-modern incarnation of the classic style. Today’s IPAs are as different form the originals as you are from your great-great-great grandparents.

A new generation of entrepreneurs would reinvent the style in the 1990s. IPA would continue to mirror the society that created it in this, its second life. The rapid pace of the technological age would generate new variants every decade, rather than every fifty-to-seventy years. The fractious, individualist post-modern world of the new Millennium would create off shoots of sub-styles almost annually.

IPA’s journey through mid-twentieth century purgatory and its eventual reincarnation as a trendy ale for a new opulent and anxious age is the focus of the next installment of this story, and of the next mixed pack.

If you enjoyed this story and would like to learn about IPA’s journey through twentieth century purgatory and into its second life as the ubiquitous global style, please let have your say by leaving a comment on this story and subscribing to our newsletter for updates. A comprehensive ten-ale mixed pack and accompanying narrative is in the works. It traces the history of IPA from the pre-Hodgson origin of pale ale, through the present-day sea of craft beer, and into the future to imagine what IPA might be like in the year 2100.

For now, the historical mixed pack is only available in British Columbia (you can order it online here). I’m planning a similar series on porters and stouts, lagers, and ancient/medieval ales. You can stay up to date on new developments via the newsletter.  

Teamwork makes the dream work, so if you’re a brewer interested in getting involved in a project to bring the story of ale to your customers, please get in touch. I’d like to get these ales around North America, and that will take some collaboration.

This story is free (sorry, the ale is not). So please pay it forward by sharing this story with someone you think would like it. If this was half as fun to read as it was to write you’ve made my day. All the best, and I’ll be in touch soon.

Nathan Vadeboncoeur,

Brewer at Brasserie du Bon Temps / Project Hop

250 Years of IPA

The India Pale Ale began in 1753 as a practical solution to the boring problem of shelf stability. A century later it had become the defining beer of the 19th century. But it’s fall was swift. Two World Wars and the rise of industrial brewing nearly killed the style. It has now made a comeback. The contemporary craft beer movement breathed new life into this ghost of the Victorian era and made it a brewing icon once again.

We’re working on mixed-pack that will include eight historically accurate IPAs and take you on a journey through 250 years of IPA. It will be ready in October, 2024. We will by then have replaced this page with an illustrated history of IPA featuring our eight label designs. For now, we can offer you a short story that sets the scene for the rise of a legendary drink.

A Pale Ale for India

Fishermen set out in thick fog against the cold of dawn. They’re wrapped in linen like men risen from the dead. Some row and some steer as their small wooden craft cut between imposing three-masted merchant ships. The merchantmen, English, Chinese, American, and Arab, are jockeying for a berth at the quay. Slack water only lasts a moment before the lightning tides of the Hoogley River race back to sea.

The tide starts to ebb as soon as the merchant ships are lashed to the cleats on shore. Their ropes groan and pop as the current grabs the hulls and tries to drag their ancient timbers with it. Anyone who wants to work here had better be good with knots. It would take a longshoreman ten thousand years to afford a fraction of the cargo of just one ship.

The fishermen are nearly out of site by now. With their sails up you’d have to run flat out along shore to keep up with them. They’ll be back with the tide at day’s end.

“The sun will burn the fog off in an hour,” a middle-aged Englishman tells you. His face is a mix of red, pink, and unhealthy brown spots. “Then it’ll start drawing the moisture out of the ground. The air gets heavy with it. By mid-morning your clothes will be soaked through with sweat. It’ll feel like you’re standing too close to a fire. Any exposed skin will blister and peel, but you’ll get used to it. Find a good hat.”

You look toward the quay. There are thousands of men, all dressed in white. Some are setting ramps against the ships. Most are waiting to unload the cargo. There are hundreds of horses. Each is tied to an empty cart.

“It’s a good thing you’re not a porter,” the Englishman observes without a hint of humor. He points to a row of large canvas tents. “But don’t think your tent will save you. Clerks have died from the heat. Drink lots of water. It’ll make you sick but you’ll get used to that, too.”

This is Calcutta harbour in 1823. The East India Company runs the Asian subcontinent, the jewel of the British Empire, and this is a major port. Ships come here from five continents. City centers shine with brilliant architecture. It’s a mix of Hindu, Gothic, Islamic, Classical and Indo-Saracenic. This part of the world hasn’t been free since the time of Romulus and Remus but it’s never had a master that had mastered the sea. Wealth is flowing out and in so quickly it would make the ancient Persians jealous. The British are building railroads, schools, hospitals, and a bureaucracy. There are universities training students in the Western intellectual tradition that learned, via Muslim scholars, the work of ancient Indian philosophers. This is now taught this back in English. India is the centre of a new multicultural global world. But Christ, it’s hot.

“As we near midday,” your guide tells you while you both walk toward the row of tents, “You’ll want a Hodgson’s ale. Years ago ale was bad down here. No bitterness. Sometimes skunked. Then Hodgson came along. He uses so many hops the beer keeps. It even has a nice finish. Dry, clean, delicious, and best of all, cold. There’s a pub over there,” he gestures vaguely to the side, “that uses saltpeter to keep it cool.” You look puzzled so he explains. “There’s some kind of chemical reaction between saltpeter and water that sucks the heat out of things. Makes ale cold on a hot day. What a time to be alive!”

You arrive at your tent and five servants greet you. Your job is to take an inventory of tea that’s come in from Asia and forward it to the proper customers throughout the colony. Your servants are there to help with anything you need. “I’ll be back to take you to the pub around noon” the weathered Englishman replies. “Good luck.”

After a frantic morning of counting, recording, repackaging, labeling, and shipping it’s time for the long mid-day break. Your servants vanish like the morning fog but like the tides, they’ll return. You sit alone for a moment. Something crawls down your neck and you swat it with your hand. It vanishes in a wet splatter. An unusually large bead of sweat. The air is still. You could fan yourself, but that’s too much effort. You lean back in your chair, close your eyes, and think of England. The cool rain, specifically. You hated it. You wanted to go away, anywhere but the cold, damp British Isles. You take a deep breath and your chest feels heavy, or maybe the air is thick.

“Hullo!” You open your eyes. Your host, the blotchy sweaty Englishman from the morning, is back. “Time for a cold one. This is a necessity for your first day in India.” You leave the tent and feel the sun on your bare neck. This isn’t the vague radiant warmth of northern latitudes. It’s like something hot is touching you. It’s uncomfortable.

You’re at the pub in ten minutes. The tables are full but there are a few open seats at the bar in the centre of the room. Your party quickly occupies two. The bar is elegant. Dark wood and copper moulding. A miniature clock tower rises from the centre and nearly touches the ceiling. Four illuminated clock faces project the time into each corner of the pub. Arched shelves with ornate woodwork extend to either side. It looks like a miniature version of a grand Gothic train station covered in liquor bottles. Four decorative pillars in the style of Classical Rome rise from the counter at each corner. They stop at the ceiling which is painted burgundy with an intricate vine pattern in plaster and gold leaf.

“Two Hodgeson’s ales, please!”

“No Hodgeson’s today, mate” the bartender replies. Your host’s complexion quickly turns from bright pink to light pink.

“No Hodgesons? How is a man supposed to survive in this godforsaken climate with no Hodgesons? Say, are we to drink Claret? Sherry?”

“Allsop’s.”

“What the devil is Allsop’s?”

The bartender smiles. He turns away and takes two imperial pint glasses off the shelf. With one hand on the tap handle and the other holding a glass beneath the swan neck spout he pumps ale from an unseen cask under the bar. He then carries the two glasses, full to the brim with Allsop’s ale, to your seat. The golden liquid sloshes as the drinking vessels come to a sudden stop on the bar. Dense white foam spills over the sides and blends with the condensation that’s already formed on the glass.

You pick it up immediately. It’s cold. You raise it to your lips and are hit in the face with an earthy, spicy aroma of cold pine in an English forest. You take a long draft and the cold liquid rushes over your palate, sparkling on your tongue. It pours down your throat and you can feel the cool hit your stomach. You’re left with a lingering sharp cold bitterness. You’ve forgotten about the heat. Perfection.

Your host, seeing your reaction, takes a sceptical draft of his own as the bartender looks on. His eyes widen. You can relate. He pulls the glass away from his lips after a long drink, lifts it up to eye level and bluntly states, “Allsop’s fuckin’ ale.” His voice is matter of fact, intoned with an affirmation of undeniable truth; this ale is delicious.

The bartender smiles. “Hodgeson’s was delayed. He shipped it with a different carrier. This one came in on the regular run. I never tasted the like of it.”

“It’s better. Cleaner. It’s got what makes Hodgeson’s so good, only more of it.”

“Aye.” A old man sitting to the other side of you agrees. His glass is half full. Its golden contents are covered by a thin foam that’s left a trail of fine white lacing down the inside of his glass. “But we’re only drinking it because of an accident.”

“An accident?”

The man laughs. “You haven’t heard?” He smiles then motions to your full pint. “It look like you have little time. Let me tell you about how they made a pale ale for India.”

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The Story of Hops

And then there is the willow wolf, whose winding, choking growth is as destructive to the willow as a wolf is to sheep. -Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 77AD

The Wolf Vine

Hops, humulus lupulus, are known as the wolf vine for their aggressive, choking growth over nearby plants.

Pliny the Elder’s vivid description of hops as a little wolf (lupulus) is still used nearly two thousand years later in the scientific name for hops: humulus lupulus. The Roman historian noticed this aggressive vine growing up to eight metres (twenty-six feet) in length by winding its tough, barbed twine around anything growing nearby. Willows, it seems, were common prey.

So how did a plant with an evocative, predatory name come to be known by the less impressive or even slightly silly name hop? No clear explanation survives. It’s possible that the name comes from an early word for hopped beer hoppe, which itself developed out of the Anglo-Saxon word hoppan (to climb). But we don’t know for sure.

We do know that people enjoyed beer for eight thousand years before they started adding hops to it. Specifically, hop flowers. The hop vine is good for making rope but it’s the flower with its delicate, aromatic yellow powder that makes the plant a critical ingredient in modern beer. The Romans had little use for these bitter flowers and it wasn’t until centuries after Pliny’s death that they start to appear as entries in the pages of history.

Our story begins with the first written record of hops as an ingredient in beer, etched onto the vellum pages of a medieval text by the hand of Bishop Adelhard in 822 at the Corbie Monastery in modern-day Amines, France. From there, hops crept from the shadow of obscurity into the brew kettles of central Europe until, like the aggressive wolf vine, they had choked out competing flavourings and held the entire brewing world in their tight embrace.

The Origin of Hopped Beer

A Household Brewery

Beer was considered a food, like bread, for most of history. And for most of the past nine thousand years woman were the brewers. The first alehouses were extensions large households built to make extra money by selling surplus drinks. There were important centres for medieval community life.

Women did most of the brewing in the Middle Ages. Beer was made at home and like other drinks it was considered food. Like bread. Some large households produced a surplus of beer and, when they could afford it, built a surplus of seating to go with it. These were called alehouses.

They weren’t called beerhouses because beer hadn’t been invented yet. Beer is what people called ale when it was brewed with hops. Before brewers began using hops they brewed ale and flavoured it with a mix of herbs called gruit. This could be anything from spruce buds to bog myrtle, juniper or heather, or really anything at all so long as people enjoyed it. These herbs contributed to flavour, helped preserve the ale, and made it more nutritious.

Ale was until recently seen as a healthy drink that could “balance the humours” and in so doing make people well and fit. There are historical recipes aimed at a variety of needs from giving people an energy boost to curing sickness or general malaise. One recipe that included sage, wormwood and even horseradish was considered “very proper for People of gross fat Constitutions, whose Glands are apt to be loaded with tough clammy humors.” It was said to be especially effective when taken in the morning.

The medical theory that illness was caused by an imbalance of the four humors (yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm) was developed by the Greek physician Hippocrates in 400 BC but was just starting to catch on in at Bishop Adelhard’s monastery. The 8th and 9th Centuries were a time of early globalization in Europe. The powerful Carolignians united all Western Europe except for the Iberian Peninsula under the great warrior king Charlemagne. Charlemagne spread not only Christianity, but also literature and science from the Classical world, and Arabic scholarship from the Middle East. His monks worked hard to make Latin translations of work by Classical Greek and contemporary Islamic scholars available from France to Italy. Bishop Adelhard may have read work by an Arab-Christian doctor named Yuhanna ibin Masawaih who valued hops for their antibacterial properties, to assist digestion and as a sleep aid.

Even if Bishop Adelhard hadn’t heard of doctor Masawaih there were many other Islamic scholars who were both popular in Europe and writing about the curative properties of hops. Hops were mostly foraged but hop gardens (humlonaria) appeared in Europe at the same time the Carolingians were importing and promoting scholarship from abroad. Hops may have been used regularly as one of the herbs making up gruit mixtures or perhaps only sporadically. We’ll likely never know because most writing at the time was on paper rather than the more durable and expensive vellum. Vellum, a sturdy writing material made from cured and stretched calf skin, is our great window into the Middle Ages. But it was far too precious for everyday writing like recipes.

The earlier evidence of the regular use of hops in beer comes from the 11th century. Beer, as the hopped version of ale, owes its origins to the polymath, Benedictine abbess and future saint Hildegaard von Bingen. Hildegaard produced a systematic examination of plants and their uses, published as her 1158 book Physica. Physica is one of the most famous medical texts ever written and is the first record of hops being used as a preservative in beer. Before Hildegaard, beer had to be brewed with a high alcohol content if brewers wanted it to have a long shelf life. This was expensive. It required more grain, incurred more grain tax, and used more firewood to produce that regular ale. Hildegaard discovered that adding hops made beer last longer than ale even with less alcohol. It was a revolutionary discovery.

Hildegaard von Bingen

Hildegaard von Bingen (from Bingen) discovered, or was at least the first to write about, the preservative qualities of hops in beer. Her work on medicinal plants, Physica, is one of the most influential medical books of all-time. Hildegaard was also a composer, philosopher, mystic, and Benedictine abbess. She founded two monasteries and is a Catholic saint. This image is an AI rendering based on existing sketches of the Saint.

Hops made economic sense. It was a magical ingredient that saved money and, possibly, even improved productivity. People drank on the job during the Middle Ages. A lot. Just how much depended on the type of work and how hard it was but the average worker consumed between two and ten pints of beer or ale per day. With a labour force that was constantly drinking, employers must have been keen to not only save money on the beer that fed them but also to have found a lower alcohol option. It probably helped that it tasted good, too. After Hildegaard’s discovery the bitter, floral taste of hops began to spread across Europe and would soon become popular for its own sake.

Europe Develops a Taste for Hops

Hopfen, hops in German, became progressively more common in brewing records during the 13th and 14th centuries as hopped beer grew in popularity in the Low Countries, Bohemia, and central Europe.  By the 15th century hops were a common ingredient across the Continent.

The use of hops as a preservative created an incentive to brewed beer in larger batches. By the 13th century brewing was shifting from a mostly household chore for women to a professional trade for men. Early commercial breweries employed eight to ten workers. They sold most of their beer locally at first but soon launched a profitable large-scale export trade once Germans developed a standard barrel size that was easy to manufacture, exchange, and re-use. Men now brewed most of the beer produced in Europe, especially in cities and large towns where there was a lot of local affordable beer. Women still brewed in the countryside and were responsible for much of what we know today as farmhouse style beers.

Commercial brewing was regulated by guilds and rulers would often give monopolies to the Church to help them raise revenue. Monasteries had always brewed, but mostly for their own consumption. The Church monopolies generated enough money to draw attention and anger from an increasingly powerful merchant class. They did not last long. Rulers began rescinding brewing monopolies in the 14th century and by the 16th century breweries were mostly secular businesses.

Monks Drawing Yeast

Monks have always brewed, but began commercial production at-scale in the 13th century. In the late Middle Ages the English word for yeast was godisgood (God is Good). Yeast was a magical but poorly understood substance that transformed malty sugar water into delicious beer. Brewers would scoop yeast foam off of a fermenting batch and add it to a new “blood warm” batch to get fermentation started.

Some monasteries continued to brew, and some do to this day. These are often known as Abbey-style beers. They include the 11 remaining Trappist breweries, over seventy other breweries also run by monks, and the world’s oldest continuously operating brewery at the Benedictine abbey at Weihenstephan, in continuous operation since 1040.

By the 15th century hops, like Charlemagne, had conquered Western Europe albeit much more slowly and quietly. And just as Charlemagne had turned a continent of pagans into zealous Christians, the delicious qualities of hops had turned the hearts of hop-less gruit drinkers to a new way of life. Or at least a new way of making beer. Gruit, the hop-less ale made with a blend of herbs that varied by region and season, had been brewed for millennia. But like the wolf vine described by Pliny, hops had sprung up to choke out the ancient gruit market after only a few centuries on the brewing scene. Their use would even become law in the world’s new brewing superpower. Bavaria.

The early 15th century was an uncertain time in Bavaria. A recent war of succession, campaigns in Italy, rebellions within the German territories, and the rumbling of religious discontent that would lead to the Protestant Reformation were all happening at once. Wilhem IV, Duke of Bavaria, needed to maintain order and be ever ready to field and feed an army. Duke Wilhelm addressed his food security challenge with Teutonic efficiency and an eye to his people’s love of beer. He created the first beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, on April 23, 1516.

The Reinheitsgebot declared that beer must be made with only barley, hops, and water. Yeast is not included as a permissible ingredient because people did not understand microbes at the time and didn’t know what it was. The new beer law created pride in pure, high quality Bavarian beer. At the same time, it ensured that rye and wheat, popular in beer but essential for bread, was reserved for food.

The Reinheitsgebot was a publicity coup for hops. If the Bavarians, famous for their excellent beer, were not even permitted to use any other flavourings, how much were these really needed? Besides, the practical German beers weren’t only delicious, they lasted longer and required less grain. Europe was impressed. But as is their wont, the English were sceptical.

Hops were not popular yet in the United Kingdom. This is where ale was brewed. It was a point of pride. Hopped beer was for Europeans, not the English. Dutch immigrants had introduced hops to England a century before, but the public was sceptical. It wasn’t until a hop growing industry emerged near Kent in the 1520s that the public began to see that hops could be an English thing, too. Within a century un-hopped ale was no longer popular. Richard Bradley, British author of a popular 1729 book called The Riches of a Hop Garden tells a story from the early 1600s that shows the how the public had turned its back on ale in favour of beer;

…what Grace it yielded to the Taste… all Men may judge, that have Sense in their Mouths: And if the Controversy be betwixt Beer and Ale, which of them shall have the Place of Pre-eminence, it suffices for the Glory and Commendation of the Beer; that herein our own Country Ale giveth place unto it; and that most part of our Countrymen doth abhor and abandon Ale, as a loathsome Drink; whereas in other Nations Beer is of great Estimation, and is by Strangers preferred as the most choice and delicate Drink.

To translate that passage into 21st century English, it says that anyone with “sense in their mouths” prefers hoppy beer to un-hopped ale. Beer deserves the glory while ale is abandoned as a “loathsome drink.” Hops had clearly caught on. Ale, at least according to Bradley, had become a backwards drink for backwards people.

Brewing records back up the claim that beer was the drink of England by the 16th century. Recipes for stouts and porters of the time contain what would today be considered an obscene volume of hops for those styles. Heavily hopped strong dark beers were a popular export product, particularly for customers in the Balkans and Russia. 

Merchant Ships Cross the Baltic

Beer degrades over time as it is exposed to heat and oxygen, both of which happened on sea voyages. Brewers did their best to preserve their cargo by making high alcohol, heavily hopped export beers. The first of these were the strong porters sent to Catherine the Great’s imperial court in the late 1700s, and then the strong, hoppy ales sent to India in the early 1800s. Today, these beers are known as Imperial Stout and India Pale Ale.

Although beer lasted longer than ale, hops could only keep it tasting fresh for about a month, given the storage conditions of the day. Beer was prone to either going bad or losing much of its initial qualities during long sea voyages. Brewers accounted for this by increasing both the alcohol and hop content of their export stouts hoping this would deliver their beer to foreign markets in top form. The strategy worked and northern Europe become a massive export market for British brewers. By doubling down on the time-tested preservative duo of high alcohol and lots of hops brewers also created a new style of super-strong dark beer that we know today as Imperial Stout.

The Tsarina Catherine the Great and her imperial court famously loved big, bold export stouts from England. With well over 10% alcohol and what is today an unrecognizable amount of hops for a dark beer, the export stouts of the late 1700s were like nothing ever produced. The lesson was soon applied to pale export beers as well. Within two decades of Catherine’s death these strong, dark export beers would inspire a new style of beer that remains the gold standard in hoppiness to this day. The India Pale Ale, or IPA.

Hoppy light-coloured beers gained popularity throughout the 18th century United Kingdom for their clean, refreshing hop flavour and absence of heavy malt. Porters and stouts were great, but they weren’t a summer drink. They certainty weren’t a drink suitable for a climate like tropical India. British expats working in sweltering conditions in the colonies were anxious for a refreshing taste of home. To their horror, when their coveted pale ales finally arrived after months at sea they tasted muted, bland, or even awful.

Although these beers were delicious when consumed fresh, they had the same problem as export stouts – they didn’t hold up on the long sea voyage to the British Overseas Territories. The sea route to India was particularly hard on beer. Hops degrade with light, oxygen, and temperature. The level of degradation is relative to the intensity of these factors that the amount of time available for them to do their work. The three-month trip from the UK to India crossed the Tropic of Cancer once and the Tropic of Capricorn twice, before ending in a sweltering environment. If beer couldn’t hold up on a Baltic sea voyage it really suffered on the way to India.

An enterprising London brewer, George Hodgson, found a solution. Boost the alcohol of pale ales and add as many hops as you would for an export stout. The result was a pale coloured export beer so bitter that by the time it reached India it tasted like a fresh pint poured back in the Empire’s capital. The British expats serving King and Country overseas loved it. It didn’t matter that it was over 7% alcohol. It was delicious. Business was so good that Alsopp thought he could increase his margins by shipping his beer himself. So, in 1822 he decided to cut out the company that helped him build his export business, the British East India Company. The Company, as it was known, was the largest business in the world and had the political clout of a nation-state with the power to make and enforce laws in India. Hodgson’s plan to cut them out of the IPA trade didn’t work out.

The chairman of the East India Company, Campbell Marjoribanks, was irked by what he saw as a slight by the brewer his company had helped make a success. He was looking for a new supplier of hoppy pale ale when a chance encounter over dinner with an entrepreneurial brewer visiting London from Burton-upon-Trent would change the history of beer. Chairman Marjoribanks presented the brewer, Samuell Alsopp, with one of Hodgson’s ales and asked him if he could brew a similar beer. Alsopp, shocked by the unusual bitterness, reportedly spat it out immediately. Composing himself, he replied that he could.

Alsopp’s version of the heavily hopped pale ale it was like nothing anyone had tried. It was a cleaner, more flavourful and more aromatic beer than even Hodgeson’s famous pale ale. With the might of the East India Company behind him, and some good luck that delayed a shipment of Hodgeson’s competing beers, Alsopp’s Burton Ale became the dominant beer of India. People in the UK even started drinking it fresh. It was the beginning of the Victorian version of the craft beer hop craze.

The secret to Alsopp’s beer was a simple regional quirk. The high mineral content of the water at Burton-upon-Trent, and the types of minerals it contained, amplified the flavour and aroma of hops. Today, brewers around the world adjust their water chemistry by adding (or removing) minerals when making IPAs to take advantage of this accidental discovery.

Alsopp’s Brewery

What started in 1740 as an on-premises brewery at an inn rode the popularity of its IPA to become the second largest brewery in the UK by 1861. But by 1911 the brewery had failed and went into receivership leaving the elegant, massive mid-19th century brewery as a monument to the optimism of Britain’s Imperial Century.

The first half of the 19th century was a great time for beer drinkers. Across the British Empire there was a wide range of styles available at all levels of hoppiness. This ranged from the descriptively named English Mild to pale ales, Extra Special Bitters, IPA and a range of hoppy dark beers. Breweries were booming in Europe, too.

Belgium had the most diverse variety of styles ranging from working-class refreshments featuring floral hops like Grisette and Saison to special strong hoppier brews made for a brewer’s favourite clients or by monks for special occasions. Germany had ended the monopoly the Dukes of Bavaria had enjoyed on brewing wheat beers (Hefeweizen), allowing every-day brewers the opportunity to try making something outside the usual constraints of the Reinheitsgebot. Even still, Germany was lager country. Dortmunder, Helles, Märzen/Oktoberfest beers, Kellerbier, Munich and Vienna Lagers were all prized for their clean maltness and expressive hops. Advances in brewing technology, increased international trade and a competitive industry was creating affordable, great beer everywhere. Everywhere, it seemed, except in the Austrian Empire.

The citizens of Plzeň were unhappy with their local beer. It was the early 1840s and local brewers had let the quality of their craft slip. The people had enough and in 1842 the people of Plzeň banded together to hire a Bavarian brewer, Josef Groll, to create a local brew for their city that could rival anything on the Continent.

After experimenting with new malting techniques and the famous local Saaz hops, Herr Groll discovered something amazing. The lightly roasted pale malt, floral Saaz hops and uniquely local water chemistry produced a beer so clean and crisp that it would one day become the most popular style in the world. Pilsner. Named for the city that gave it life, the first modern pilsner was brewed on October 5, 1842. What is now known as Pilsner Urquell is still commercially available today and is one of the world’s largest pilsner brands.

Hops in Modern Brewing

Hops had finally conquered eastern Europe with the invention of the Czech Pilsner. The massive popularity of hoppy lager styles, together with the IPA and the widespread use of hops in traditionally low or un-hopped beers in the Low Countries created a surge in the demand for, and the price of, hops. Hop acreage more than doubled, increasing from 35,000 acres to 72,000 acres in England between 1800 and 1878. The peak of the hop craze began in the 1870s and continued through the 1880s following German unification.

Each country had its favourite styles. Each region, its specialties. Each city it’s proud local invention. And every brewer had his own take. Beer was passionately local. It was even a part of regional identity, like a shoulder patch proudly stitched onto a uniform.

This massive growth in the popularity of hops is in large part a result of good timing. The 19th century was the beginning of what historians call The Great Divergence, when European nations became economic and political superpowers. Population doubled. Beer consumption doubled. Economic output per person increased many times over. The invention of the steam engine, expansion of railroads, and the discovery of microbes led to the rise of large breweries that could reliably produce and ship consistently high-quality products. The United States became a major hop producer. The West’s economic miracle was also a miracle for beer.

But it wouldn’t last. Intensive cultivation contributed to depleted soils and less-resilient plants. Unusually cold weather stressed crops and an outbreak of hop diseases crashed yields. Downy mildew, verticillium wilt and hop aphids ripped through crops in America and then Europe. Rising hop prices led to a reduction in the use of hops, leading to a rise in popularity of more affordable, less hoppy styles. By 1909 hop acreage in England had returned to where it had been in 1800. And then the unthinkable happened. The rising tide of nationalism that helped build beer into a part of regional identity took a dark turn. War, which many in Europe thought had become so expensive and economically ruinous as to be impossible, broke out in 1914.

Hop production plummeted in Germany and decreased further across Europe and the UK. By the 1930s England had only 16,500 acres of hops and the hop industry on the east coast of the United States had completely collapsed. War returned after the Great Depression. German hop yields decreased by two thirds. Economic depression retuned to Europe after the war as an entire continent struggled to rebuild following its industrial-scale self-destruction. But a tender green shoot of hope emerged from the rubble of the blitz. A centre for hop research was founded in 1947 at Wye College in London, though it would be decades until the implications of this would be seen.

Early Season Hop Bine

A young hop bine climbs a rope trellis in spring. New varieties like Brewer’s Gold that developed out of the breeding program at Wye College contributed new, more potent flavours and were more resistant to disease. American hop breeding programs soon followed, developing more varieties in the late 20th century like this Centennial, developed at Washington State University and released in 1990.

The 20th century was a dark age for beer in general, and hops in particular. The period between 1930 and 1980 was especially bad. A period of industrial consolidation cast its shadow over the brewing world. Small breweries were purchased and closed by big conglomerates with the soulless efficiency of High Modernism. Tradition was out. Science was in. Beer became an industrial product. Flavour and regional style weren’t as important as efficiency and standardization. Cheap consistency was the goal. Sure, the beer wasn’t very good but this was also the age of advertising. Beer was no longer what the local brewer or pub owner liked to make. It was what corporations told you to drink. Where it was from hardly mattered because it was all the same.

But there were small oases of hope in the desert of industrial lager. Some people remembered that beer was more than high-efficiency malt with just enough hop extract to balance what little sweetness remained after fermentation. Traditional brewers had become like Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. They were monk-like rebels operating small pubs in rural Germany and England. Or old Nordic farmhouse brewers the industrial beer empire ignored like the backwards inhabitants of some half-forgotten solar system. There were even actual monks brewing time-tested recipes in real monasteries throughout Belgium and Holland. But in North America there was nothing like that.

The 19th century beer enthusiasm had faded from memory in the New World. Cocktails were trendy. Wine was always fashionable and sprits had a rugged Frontier prestige. Beer was that other drink. Even though it had always been enjoyed at or just below room temperature, companies in the Americas implored people to drink their beer ice cold because it tasted so bad warm. Benjamin Franklin would never have said “beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy” if he lived in the 20th century.

The situation was intolerable for those who had tasted traditional European brews. Some of these folks channelled their outrage into start-up North American brewpubs. Like sanctimonious reverse-Puritans they intended to escape the tyranny of New World corporate brewers by bringing back Old World traditions. The tentative popularity of their brewpubs during the 1980s encouraged the advent of start-up microbreweries.

The early efforts of these brewers focused on an English classic, the pale ale. But the style of pale ale that emerged in North America differed from its relatives across the Atlantic. That green shoot of hope that grew from the rubble of the second World War, the hop research institute at Wye College, had blossomed into new varieties of hops. Decades of hybridizing wild North American hops with time-tested European varieties had yielded a new family of hop. Called New World or American hops, these differed from their Old World, or Noble, counterparts. They had more bittering power and, rather than being floral and herbaceous, they had distinctly citrus and pine-like characteristics. This new style began to develop a cult following.

The next step was IPA. If hoppy pale ale made from American hops was good then ultra-hoppy IPA should be even better. Only it wasn’t clear what, exactly, an IPA was back in those pre-Internet days. Based on the beers that were released under the name IPA it seems like small-scale North American brewers took contemporary British pale ales with their copper colour and mild caramel flavour and scaled them up. The 4% alcohol mildly hoppy pale ales became 6-7% malt monsters balanced only by a volume of hops not seen in brew kettles for nearly a century. Since traditional IPA contained only pale malt these were a new style and came to be known as Northwest IPA, named after the northwest coast of North America where they were first produced.

Brewers on the east coast responded with a style of their own in the early 2000s. Wanting the let the hops shine through as the dominant flavour they cut out the darker malts and made a pale beer that resembles the traditional IPA more closely, only with American hops. Since hops lose some of their volatile flavours when boiled, east coast brewers began adding hops at the end of the boil and even during or after fermentation, a process called dry-hopping, to get more hop flavour into their beers. Since hops require boiling for their bitterness to be extracted there was no limit to the amount a brewer could add as a dry-hop addition to a beer. The bitterness would remain the same but the flavour and aroma would increase.

Some brewers added so many hops that the residual hop oils in the beer left it hazy. Another style was born. It is now called hazy IPA. Less bitter than its northwest cousin but with more citrus aroma it is now the more popular of the two styles. Contemporary hazy IPA often differs from the original in that its haziness comes not from hop oils but leftover proteins extracted from flaked wheat or oats added to the beer in addition to the malted barley to give it a milky haze.

The popularity of IPA during the 2000s and the haze craze of the 2010s led to a boom in hop production like the one in the late 1800s. New varieties became common as more hop breeding programs have developed around the world. Hop cultivation doubled by acreage in the United States from the year 2000 to 2020. The USA now produces a similar volume of hops as Germany, whose production has recovered over the past 40 years along with much of Europe’s other hop farming nations like the Czech Republic and Slovenia. The English hop industry has not recovered. This is due in part to higher global demand for the favours of American and German hops as well as those of specialty varieties from new hop producing nations like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. But English hops remain iconic in classic English styles and their market is stable.

A Modern Hop Farm

Modern farms grow hops in clean rows which are machine harvested. Farmers tie ropes to a wire tressles and train hop shoots to grow up them by winding the shoots around the ropes when they emerge in the spring. The harvest is done by mid-September.

Today, the majority of hops are produced by large farms who are owned by, or sell to, four big hop conglomerates. These companies, however, are not like the high modernist breweries of the 20th century. They run their own breeding programs and are pushing the science of hops forward in search of new expressive flavours. Small farmers are getting involved, too. They lack the capital to grow the new innovative varieties, which are patented and expensive, but leverage their unique growing conditions to produce distinctive products. Like producers and brewers of old, they are helping bring products to market that showcase their regions terroir – the unique flavours and aromas that results from the distinctive climate, soil and landscape where a plant is grown.

We are now living at the beginning of a hop renaissance. Big producers are advancing the science of hop breeding and small producers are making their unique terroir available to those who know where to look. The tentative microbrewery market of the 1980s has exploded into tens of thousands of craft beer producers worldwide. Small brewers are now exploring the more delicate flavours of hops with traditional pilsners and lagers after thirty years of IPA-focused brewing.

New styles of beer are sure to emerge as the number of new hops varieties continues to increase and small brewers look for ways to differentiate themselves in a crowded market. Old styles will be reimagined using modern brewing techniques and ingredients. It’s impossible to say what the future holds for hops. But after one thousand years of brewing tradition were nearly wiped out during the twentieth century hops are resurgent. The beautiful tradition of local brewing culture that embraced hops and pulled the plant from obscurity is now being lifted back into its proper place.  

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Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this article you can help us out by telling a friend about it. That would mean a lot to us. You can also sign up for Project Hop email using the form below to get updates about the latest in hops science, read engaging stories about the history of hops, and stay up-to-date about new articles, videos and what’s going on at the brewery. It’s designed to give you a window into the world of hops and brewing. Thanks again for reading to the end. Cheers!

What is Terroir? A Definition and Three Things to Get You Started

1. each farm produces its own flavours and aromas

If culture is “the way things are done around here” then terroir is culture for plants. It’s “the way we grow around here.” Climate, soil, landscape, and the microbes that live within the soil create unique conditions that plants need to learn and adapt to so they can thrive.

The best known examples of terroir are probably wine and coffee. For wine, terroir affects the sugar content and tannins. For coffee, altitude is an important factor. High altitude coffee trees produce smaller beans with a sweeter more floral taste while low altitude trees produce larger more chocolate flavoured beans.

Terroir affects the oil content in hops and the ratio of aromatic terpenes within it. The result is differences in bitterness and the balance of flavours between citrus and pine to floral and earthy. Check out the following image that shows the results of a blind aroma test of two Cashmere hops grown on different farms.

Twenty three brewers participated in a blind aroma test of hops and rated on a scale of 1-5 the presence, if any, of common hop aromas. A total of ten hops were used in this test and the brewers were sure that they were all different varieties. In fact, they were all the same variety just from different farms around North America. Each farm produced its own unique version of the same variety of hop. This was exciting news for brewers that are used to buying blended hops from large distributors who aim to make their product always perform the same.

2. Hop terroir almost disappeared during the 20th century

Although beer is thousands of years old, hops weren’t a common ingredient until the 13th century. But the 19th century was the reign of the hop, as acreage tripled in many hop-producing nations. Farmers, brewers and especially drinkers argued over which region produced the best hops. Back then there were only a handful of varieties, compared to the hundreds on the market today, a result of modern breeding programs. Where they were from made a big difference.

Each country had its favourite styles. Each region, its specialties. Each city it’s proud local invention. And every brewer had his own take. Beer was passionately local. It was even a part of regional identity, like a shoulder patch proudly stitched onto a uniform. 

But it wouldn’t last. Intensive cultivation contributed to depleted soils and less-resilient plants. Unusually cold weather stressed crops and an outbreak of hop diseases crashed yields. Downy mildew, verticillium wilt and hop aphids ripped through crops in America and then Europe. Rising hop prices led to a reduction in the use of hops, leading to a rise in popularity of more affordable, less hoppy styles. By 1909 hop acreage in England had returned to where it had been in 1800. And then the unthinkable happened. The rising tide of nationalism that helped build beer into a part of regional identity took a dark turn. War, which many in Europe thought had become so expensive and economically ruinous as to be impossible, broke out in 1914.

Hop production plummeted in Germany and decreased further across Europe and the UK. By the 1930s England had only 16,500 acres of hops and the hop industry on the east coast of the United States had completely collapsed. War returned after the Great Depression. German hop yields decreased by two thirds. Economic depression retuned to Europe after the war as an entire continent struggled to rebuild following its industrial-scale self-destruction. But a tender green shoot of hope emerged from the rubble of the blitz. A centre for hop research was founded in 1947 at Wye College in London, though it would be decades until the implications of this would be seen.

The 20th century was a dark age for beer in general, and hops in particular. The period between 1930 and 1980 was especially bad. A period of industrial consolidation cast its shadow over the brewing world. Small breweries were purchased and closed by big conglomerates with the soulless efficiency of High Modernism. Tradition was out. Science was in. Beer became an industrial product. Flavour and regional style weren’t as important as efficiency and standardization. Cheap consistency was the goal. Sure, the beer wasn’t very good but this was also the age of advertising. Beer was no longer what the local brewer or pub owner liked to make. It was what corporations told you to drink. Where it was from hardly mattered because it was all the same.

3. Hop terroir started making a comeback in 2016

The explosive popularity of craft beer, especially the uber-hoppy IPA, during the 21st century created a renewed interest in hops. Increased demand raised prices and small farmers began experimenting with this new cash crop. Small-scale farms sprung up throughout North America, Australia, New Zeland and Europe. Often these were tiny operations with farmers converting a small portion of their land to hops.

Hops are a perennial crop, growing back from the roots each season. It takes about five years for hops to reach full productivity, making the 2020s the first decade of what might become a new hop terroir renaissance. But small scale farmers need your help. Brewers are sceptical of the quality of hops from small, unknown farms. They don’t have the time to obtain and evaluate hundreds of samples from around the world. Certainly, some of these small scale hops aren’t good, usually due to a lack of farmer access to expensive harvesting and processing equipment. But some are fantastic.

We’re putting in the work to get samples, test them in blind aroma trials, make test batches, and then bring you the best hops in single-origin, terroir beers. These beers can show the brewing industry that small farmers can produce great hops.

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Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this article you can help us out by telling a friend about it. That would mean a lot to us. You can also sign up for Project Hop email using the form below to get updates about the latest in hops science, read engaging stories about the history of hops, and stay up-to-date about new articles, videos and what’s going on at the brewery. It’s designed to give you a window into the world of hops and brewing. Thanks again for reading to the end. Cheers!

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