IPA: the well-travelled beer

By Phil Mellows

Walk into a bar, order an IPA, and what will you get? It’s hard to say. During the past 200 years, the style has evolved into a great, sprawling family of beers, and the special event staged by the British Guild of Beer Writers last week to mark the bicentenary was, above all, a celebration of diversity.

The 60 guests crammed into the billiards room at Burton Constitutional Club got to try three new India Pale Ales.

The first was, in fact, a recreation of a very old IPA, based on a recipe culled from Allsopp’s 1820s brewing ledgers, recently unearthed by Jamie Allsopp, who unveiled a plaque for the occasion (pictured) beside the site of the Allsopp’s Burton brewery, a little way up the road. (Allsopp’s was taken over by Ind Coope in the 1930s and disappeared into what became Allied Breweries before the latest generation bought back the brand and is now brewing again.)

Celebration IPA, as it’s known, is a work in progress and not yet on sale, but it’s an intriguing insight into those early, heavily hopped beers designed to survive the journey to India for the refreshment of the Raj.

It’s strong, at 7.5% abv, dark amber and sweet, but you must imagine it maturing on that four-month sea voyage into the sparkling brew that the expats lapped up to such an extent that Allsopp’s, along with Bass, which seized on the export potential of IPA a little later, came to dominate Burton’s brewing industry. As late as the 1990s, when I worked on the Bass in-house newspaper, the company was still able to claim the title of ‘Britain’s biggest brewer’.

Such a status was, of course, built on the exploitation of empire, a history that journalist David Jesudason aims to highlight in the beer he introduced to the gathering. Empire State of Mind, a ‘decolonised IPA’, came out of a piece with that title he wrote for online magazine Good Beer Hunting.

You should read it for yourself, but one point he makes is that, despite the branding, there was nothing Indian about IPA. So, his beer, brewed at London’s Villages Brewery, introduces coriander, fennel, jaggery, mango, turmeric, bergamot and lime into the brew – along with the hops, obviously.

This giddy cocktail of eastern spices puts an interesting, delicious spin on Jesudason’s favourite beer, Villages’ Big Salad, a typically cloudy 5.8% New England IPA.

The third beer we tasted was Now IPA, a collaboration between Jonny Garrett of the Craft Beer Channel video show and Meantime Brewery.

Compared with the other two, this one was strikingly bitter, showcasing, as it does, new British-grown hop varieties Olicana, Jester and Harlequin in an effort to support an ailing domestic hop industry. You can watch the full story behind it here.

So, three very different beers. The question is, what makes them all IPA? What does that even mean these days when the evolution of the style has accelerated wildly in recent decades thanks to US brewers recreating IPAs with American hops and effectively inventing ‘craft beer’ as a result.

Garrett described IPA to the gathering in Burton as “a family of styles, variations on a theme”, that theme being hop-forward beers. There also seemed to be general agreement that an IPA must be above a certain strength. Yet the country’s best-selling IPA, the Greene King one, is a mere 3.6% abv.

And those sweet and juicy New England IPAs are now being dismissed by some as not true to IPA style.

As beer historian Martyn Cornell explains in the Craft Beer Channel’s handy history of IPA, the label has been loosely used by breweries for a long time. The important thing is, as Garrett put it, that “we ensure it never becomes just a marketing term”, and remembering the rich, fascinating heritage of India Pale Ale in all its confounding complexity, as we did in Burton last week, is one way of doing that.