Meet the Brew: New England Pale Ale
This is Brick Brewery’s just-launched, super-crushable New England Pale Ale (4.4% ABV), which we’ve been sending out to the DeskBeers family this week. At DeskBeers, we’re huge fans of interesting beers being brewed at sensible strengths (check out our feature on Partizan’s ace new Table Juice), and New England Pale definitely fits the bill. Brewed with four types of hops, it’s absolutely packed with juice, but a modest ABV (compared to typical New England IPAs) makes it great for session drinking. We reached out to the good people at Brick for some info on their new brew:
A New England Pale Ale (NEPA) follows in the footsteps of its bigger brother, the New England IPA (NEIPA). It’s an unfiltered, naturally hazy ale, which substitutes the caramel forward malt character of traditional pale ales for a light silken mouthfeel imparted by piles of oat malt. Hops are the central character of the NEPA as it drops bittering hops to a minimum in favour of lavish late kettle and repeated dry hop additions. The feast of tropical flavours and aromas donated by Citra, Simcoe, Mosaic, and Chinook hops is intertwined with fruity esters from a New England yeast fermented at warmer than usual temperatures. All of the fun of a NEIPA but with only 4.4% alcohol, this is truly a brewer’s favourite beer.
New England IPAs (NEIPAS) are an interesting species of pale ale. They tend to be hazy in texture, and are characterized by lush and even sweet fruit flavours (think passion fruit and pineapple, for instance). Cloudwater have garnered a reputation for being specialists in this area (their collab with BrewDog, New England IPA v2, was awesome), but there’s a whole variety of great beer being brewed in this vein.
This hazy take on the pale dials back the bitterness and emphasizes warmer fruit flavours; in general, it is characterized by a certain fuzziness, as distinct from the crisper punch of the classic American IPA. Of course, these are not rigorous categories (and have not been for quite some time), and you certainly might regard the New England pales as foregrounding certain aspects already present, at a lower frequency, in American IPAs. Samuel Adams founder Jim Koch, in a thoughtful interview on The Haas Blog (I urge you to go there and read it in full), makes it clear that he subscribes to a similarly ‘evolutionary’ view of the IPA:
Today, when you say IPA, you don’t mean [British hops such as] Golding and Fuggles… You mean Cascade or Simcoe® or Citra® or Amarillo®. So 25 years ago the IPA style evolved and to me, New England IPA is the next evolution of it. Just like West Coast IPA, the origins of it are unclear. It’s emerged in the last few years here in New England as something new in the IPA world and it’s quite different than previous IPA styles. There have been hazy IPAs for a while, but this juiciness, unique fruit character and silkiness are a defining part of what makes New England IPAs so unique.
Elsewhere in the interview, Koch stresses that the genesis of these New England hallmarks remains fairly enigmatic: one might venture the pun that we have at present only a hazy idea of what ‘makes’ a NEIPA. There is a broad consensus that it comes from the late addition of hops in the whirlpool, but little specific insight beyond that. What that means is: when you’re drinking a New England beer such as Brick’s kick-ass New England Pale Ale (like many DeskBeers customers are right now), you’re drinking an ongoing learning process. And we don’t think you can get more craft beer than that.
