Tips For a Quality Hazy IPA

Welcome back to the world of homebrewing after your quarter-century hiatus! Not sure where you are in the process of brewing your current batch of New England IPA and hope this answer helps clear up a few things in your quest for unclarity. My basic advice is to give your beer a few days in your secondary to allow fermentation to complete and those hops that you probably tossed in towards the last couple days of fermentation to settle, and then transfer to your keg where you can cool, carbonate, and enjoy.

Hazy IPAs have really exploded as a style over the last five years and there are many twists and tricks brewers use to give these brews their cloudy look. The good news is that brewers can produce these brews by following a few relatively simple steps that will result in solid examples of the style. After the basics are mastered, tweaks can be made to fine-tune appearance, aroma, mouthfeel, foam stability and cling, and yield. But since you are still getting your brewing legs back in shape, it may be best by starting with just a small list of key pointers to consider. And for other readers, I am going to assume that you are beginning from scratch with a new brew.

Let’s begin by loosely defining the style before jumping into the weeds about how to brew a solid New England IPA. Not to get caught up in the numbers game on this as the Brewers Association (BA) now has four style categories designated as “Juicy or Hazy [fill in the blank],” but in general terms, most of these beers, excluding doubles and imperials, have original gravities in the 1.048–1.065 (12–16 °Plato) range, have a very pale, blond/straw color, are low in perceived bitterness, have lots of hop aroma (especially citrus, ripe tropical fruit, and stone fruit notes falling under the giant umbrella named “juicy”), often have a creamy/silky palate, expressive aromas from yeast esters, and sufficiently high carbonation to fit with the body and to puff up into a white and wispy foam.

A good, all-around New England IPA can be brewed incorporating the following pointers:

• Low carbonate water with a 2:1 ratio of chloride-to-sulfate is frequently cited as a great water balance. If you are using reverse osmosis (RO) water, aim for about 150 ppm calcium from a combination of calcium chloride and calcium sulfate. Adding 3.1 grams calcium chloride and 1.7 grams of calcium sulfate to 10 liters of RO will give you 150 ppm calcium, 96 ppm sulfate, and 195 ppm chloride. Water is important, but don’t get too hung up on worrying about the chemistry until you need to.
• Keep the grist bill simple. 80% pale malt, 10% flaked oats, and 10% flaked wheat works well. As with water, add complexity or process tweaks if the finished beer needs help in the grist bill department. Depending on your mashing method, rice hulls definitely help with wort collection.
• Don’t add too much hop bitterness to your wort during boiling; a modest addition at the beginning of the boil lays down a bit of bitterness on the blank canvas and helps suppress foaming during the boil. After the boil, knock the wort temperature down to about 176 °F (80 °C) before adding your aroma hops to hot wort. The reduced temperature will help keep isomerization to a minimum and allows for big additions for aroma. And consider adding about a third of your aroma hops to the hot wort and the remaining two thirds as dry hop additions.
• Use a yeast strain that is known for the style. There are a handful out there that work well, such as Wyeast’s London Ale III and SafAle’s S–04 or Imperial’s Juice just to name a few. Choosing something with a proven track record is a great start. One of the keys to this style is hop biotransformation and this is largely a function of yeast strain.
• A good dry-hopping schedule is to add a third of your aroma hops about 24 hours after vigorous fermentation begins, and the last third 48 hours later. A more advanced approach can be taken by timing your additions based on specific gravity, but this requires sampling and is not a requirement for making a good example.
• Only add hops that smell good. If you have hops that seem off in terms of aroma quality or if they have aromas that you don’t like, don’t use them. Hops are an agricultural product and vary by growing location and crop year. The concept of terroir may seem esoteric, but it’s real.
• Allow your beer to settle well before packaging into bottle or keg, and, like most other beer styles, do be concerned about oxidation.

If all goes well, you will end up with a great beer. But what about the haze? I have talked to lots of commercial brewers about this style and the consensus among the group I have polled is that few brewers are adding mono-tasker ingredients whose only purpose is haze. Some brewers are happy enough with a great tasting brew and don’t obsess about the haze. The basic guide earlier in the answer will definitely end up with a cloudy brew.

In the world of commercial brewing, consistency is pretty important, especially for packaging breweries, so haze stability is a thing. And it’s a perplexing conundrum because cloudy beer is inherently unstable. Why? Because haze particles tend to be more dense than beer and gravity never takes a day off. The interesting thing about this topic is that the vast majority of the hazy volume on the market is centrifuged before packaging. In other words, the haze is not from yeast and it is not from “chunky stuff” floating about in the beer. The cloudy appearance of this style is the product of protein and polyphenol (tannin) interactions, and it seems that a significant portion of these haze particles are not very dense and tend to stay bobbing about in their hoppy homes. Although most hazies contain somewhere between 10–30% flaked grain adjuncts that do bring protein to the party, it appears that the main haze ingredient is the big boost of polyphenols that comes with the massive hop additions commonly used in these brews.

Brewing, and more broadly cooking, marries science with art and the vision of the brewer drives the outcome towards this idea. My view on the haze part of this style is that the turbidity of the beer is secondary to all other attributes. The list of tips above touch on water flavor and pH balance, color, mouthfeel, foam, hop bitterness, hop aroma, and yeast expression. New England IPAs were not developed to look cloudy; the emphasis was on beer flavor and the haze thing came along for the ride. This is your fourth brew since your sixth brew 25 years ago and you are best advised to focus on your technique and beer flavor before looks. One step at a time, Bob. Fact of the day: A lousy-tasting beer rarely improves by altering its appearance!

Response by Ashton Lewis.