ON TAP By James Figy
Hazes loaded Photos by James Figy
B
aseball season is in full swing. The Twins avoided a lockout. The St. Paul Saints are as entertaining as ever. And the Mankato MoonDogs will blast off with a season opener later this month. I love enjoying a beer at the ballpark, and what I reach for is hazy. That cool, citrusy offshoot of the IPA family is unequivocally refreshing, with mild bitterness and ABVs that often swing for the fences.
Nowadays, every nanobrewery up to macro corp. is making at least one. You can find them at LocAle and Mankato Brewery, Lost Sanity in Madelia, Half Pint and Ward House in Waseca — and the list goes on. But it wasn’t always this way. Not long ago, the head brewer at a Minnesota brewpub confessed to me a hatred of hazies. This individual only saw production flaws, signs of incorrect clarification, in all that dank murkiness. Other brewers believed the Northeast IPA (NEIPA)
Piano Lessons exemplifies the unexpected tastes of BlackStack: an 8.1% DIPA with Citra Cryo, El Dorado, Mosaic Cryo and a smidge of Sabro.
would be a fad. How did we get to the ubiquity of haze in a few years? Let’s look at how the rapid rise of IPAs slid this way, then use two Minnesota breweries to show the spectrum.
Bitter up
First off, I lean heavily on “The Beer Bible: Second Edition” for any brewing history. And as author Jeff Alworth writes, IPAs are really an American invention — at least, as we know them today. The Indian pale ale was a marginal style even during the height of the British empire, when brewers started using higher hop quantities to stabilize ales to survive transport to India. Briefly, breweries tried to market them in Great Britain as something exotic and elite to little success. In the 1970s, ales started to emerge with early craft brewers in the U.S. But the IPA really wasn’t reborn until the ’90s, and at that time, it was a brutally bitter, malty concoction that most considered niche and a passing fad. Fast forward about two decades, and the most popular style in the world is having an identity crisis. On the one hand, the West Coast IPA offered a clear, piney, moderately bitter affair, while this emerging style without a single name — the hazy, juicy, Northeast, milkshake IPA — began to muck up taplines across the nation. In some cases, the hops and malt bill are extremely similar between the two styles. But West Coast IPAs follow the traditional process of adding hops during the boil, while hazy IPAs rely on dry-hopping — adding hops to the ale after primary fermentation. This decision essentially makes the style. Dry-hopping reduces bitterness, builds that dank, citrusy aroma and causes the characteristic cloudiness. Early on, the haze was seen as a side effect of chemical reactions during dry-hopping. In this view, there once was some
46 • MAY 2022 • MANKATO MAGAZINE
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