It’s late November 2009, and at a bar in Burlington, Vermont, a group of brewers are toasting to Greg Noonan, the late founder of the Vermont Pub & Brewery. One of them is John Kimmich, Noonan’s protege and founder of The Alchemist Brewery. Another is Shaun Hill, who has flown in from abroad to pay his respects and check in at his home of Hill Farmstead, where he plans to open a brewery in just a few months.
Noonan was—is—a brewing legend. After a long legislative battle, he founded the first microbrewery in Vermont, a state now known internationally for its beer. He also brought what was allegedly Boddington’s yeast back from the U.K., and used it to brew the beers that went on to inspire the Hazy IPA movement. Nearly as importantly, he taught Kimmich everything he knows.
Back at the bar, Kimmich and Hill are remembering the impact Noonan had on them and, like many people do at funerals, starting to consider their own legacies. In a blog he wrote about the moment, Hill wonders: “What is ‘a’ life? What is important? An idea?” Noonan had so many during his career, born out of British brewing traditions brought back to life with an American twist. His global impact was yet to be felt, but it’s clear both these brewers understood how important his ideas would become.
Hill had, in fact, come home via Montreal, where he’d joined in a collaboration brew day with Microbrasserie Dieu du Ciel, before accompanying the team down to Burlington. The beer was to be named Pionnière—“Pioneer”—in memory of Noonan. The mash tun overflowed with roasted and biscuit malts before the wort was saturated with Simcoe, Amarillo, Cascade, and Columbus hops, to make the most bitter beer Dieu du Ciel had ever brewed.
For all of Noonan’s varied accomplishments, when dedicating a brew to his late friend, Hill had chosen a Black IPA.
Black IPA was arguably the first viral craze of the craft beer revolution. While beers like the American Pale Ale and IPA gained traction over decades, the Black IPA went from regional curiosity to global phenomenon in a relative blip. There were more breweries around the world than there had been for a century, and for a time, the style spread unabated—then fizzled out nearly as quickly.
That’s because, despite being common in brewery core ranges from roughly 2008 to 2014, the style had a persistent image problem. How can an India Pale Ale even be black, detractors wanted to know? Don’t roasted malts clash with fruity hops, or add excessive bitterness? And if a heavily hopped Dark Ale is a Black IPA, then what’s a Cascadian Dark Ale—and where does that leave Export India Porters?
In contrast, by 2015 a new style was coming to prominence that had a much simpler appeal. In New England, breweries such as Tree House Brewing Company and Trillium Brewing Company were bringing an accessible, hazy, and sweet version of India Pale Ale to the masses—or rather, the masses were coming to them. The way these breweries made it, New England IPA removed the classical IPA’s bitterness, and offered the nostalgic, comforting flavors of childhood candy. The new style’s opaque, golden color also meant it was Instagram-ready, just as the app’s popularity was climbing.
In little more than a year, dry and bitter beer had seemingly fallen out of favor. Meanwhile, Black IPA’s demise was so quick and conspicuous that we’ve come to understand the cycle of most other beer trends by its example. Every time a new style rises to prominence, the first question asked is whether it will “do a Black IPA.”
Anyone who had written off New England IPA in its early days was proved spectacularly wrong, of course. Instead, the narrative became that NEIPA was the cultural opposite of Black IPA. One came out of nowhere to take over the world, tearing apart official style definitions and recipe books, while the other was condemned to the footnotes. What’s forgotten in this tidy summation is that both beer styles came from the same source, and that those closest to it—some of the best breweries in the world—have never given up on the Black IPA.
You could argue that the first Black IPA was brewed sometime in the mid 1800s, when British breweries such as Bass Brewery, Whitbread Brewery, and JW Lees were sending their highly hopped Porters to India. In 1865, the London-based Barclay Perkins brewed an “Export Porter” at an assertive 65 IBUs, and then dry hopped it in cask for good measure. But surprisingly, the first American example of the Black IPA, brewed at Noonan’s Vermont Pub & Brewery around 1990, took inspiration from elsewhere.
Noonan’s original recipe was for a rich, hoppy Scotch Ale, which he called Tartan IPA. His head brewer at the time, Glenn Walter, then brewed a darker version called Black and Bitter, apparently inspired by the divorce he was going through at the time. Good taste prevailed, and the beer was renamed Blackwatch IPA, but it wasn’t brewed again until Kimmich joined the team in 1995. He came across the recipe in the archives while looking for something new to brew, and asked Noonan about re-releasing it.
“I was immediately intrigued by the recipe, because I had a love of Porters and IPAs,” says Kimmich. “This seemed to be the bridge between the two.”
Kimmich didn’t quite stick to the recipe, however. He’d recently come across a roasted German malt called Carafa Special 3, which is dehusked to remove most of the associated burnt bitterness. It allowed German brewers to make Dark Lagers and Hefeweizens that had an inky color and toasted bread notes without ruining their signature soft finishes. Kimmich used it to infuse Blackwatch with its color and the roastiness he was looking for without distracting from the big hop finish with too much astringency.
“The combination of the dark roast with a bright hoppy character—I absolutely loved it,” he says. “I probably made it three or four times during my tenure with Greg [Noonan]. Each time we brewed it, we gave it a little tweak and I generally upped the hops.”
Kimmich founded The Alchemist in Waterbury in 2003, taking a head full of Noonan’s ideas and inspiration with him. Along with the famous Conan yeast strain and the seeds of what would become Heady Topper, he carried his love of hoppy Dark Ales over, too. Every Christmas, Kimmich brews El Jefe, a “Dark IPA” (in his parlance) named after his very large black cat. He reduced the amount of Carafa Special 3 to the point where the beer was almost brown, and dry hopped it with mountains of Simcoe to create seasonal notes of fresh pine. It was this beer, in turn, that inspired Shaun Hill to brew his first Black IPA around 2005, Darkside, while working at The Shed Brewery in Stowe.
The notion of combining toasted malt character and citrusy or piney hop aromatics continued to spread. Mitch Steele, the soon-to-be Stone Brewing brewmaster, tasted Hill’s beer at BeerAdvocate’s Extreme Beer Fest in Boston in 2006, describing it as “complex, and aggressively hopped.” After a conversation with Hill he went away with the idea “in his back pocket,” bringing it out for Stone’s 11th anniversary brew the next year. The test brews, however, did not go well—an early hint at where the style might come unstuck.
“I was using a blend of black malt and roasted barley and they all came out like hoppy Porters,” he says. “I was sitting there, I was kind of frustrated with our lack of progress when I got thinking about German Schwarzbier.”
Schwarzbier is a dry, malt-forward German Lager that balances sweeter Pilsner and Munich malts with coffee and chocolate notes. It’s differentiated from the more common Munich Dunkel by its jet-black appearance that comes without any Porter- or Stout-like roastiness—only achievable thanks to Carafa Special 3. Making that connection led Steele to take the same approach as Kimmich: building a classic Double IPA backbone and spiking it with debittered roasted malt. The result was Stone Sublimely Self-Righteous Black IPA, a midnight-black, 90-IBU beer with notes of orange, pine resin, and fruity coffee that was so popular with the public it went year-round.
Before most drinkers had even heard of Black IPA, several distinct forms were emerging. Shaun Hill’s Darkside and Hill Farmstead James were very dark, charred, and hop-saturated—carefully treading the line so as not to overbalance into either IPA or Porter territory. Meanwhile, Kimmich was taking a Double IPA base and adding streaks of darkness and roast for complexity, a technique Steele had also stumbled upon in California. Steele wasn’t the first to brew a Black IPA on the West Coast, though.
While the brewers of Vermont continued to experiment and find their own paths, the brewers of the Pacific Northwest were playing around with high hopping levels and darker malts, too.
In 1999, Rogue Ales released Brutal Bitter, brewed to celebrate the 24th birthday of the Horse Brass Pub in Portland, Oregon. The heavily hopped beer (for then) proved popular, and later morphed into Rogue’s famous Brutal IPA. Before that, though, the brewery released an offshoot called Blackened Brutal Bitter.
That beer never pretended to be an IPA. It was brewed without dry hopping to train focus on its darker malts and pine-needle bitterness, and restricted to 5.5% ABV to make for a sessionable and crisp Black Ale. It’s this spinoff that Oregon beer writer Jeff Alworth says came to be known as the Cascadian Dark Ale.
“Basically I think the idea was to position it as a regional style because it tasted like a slightly charred Douglas Fir,” he says.
The distinction, however, was lost on most consumers. All three Black IPA interpretations looked almost identical, and shared many common ingredients, even if the amounts and processes varied. And with the rise of IPA as a brand in itself, there’s no doubt some brewers renamed their Cascadian Dark Ales in search of better sales. It was in the space between these three beers that the cracks began to form.
“There were some pretty terrible versions of it being brewed around the world,” says Kimmich. “They tended to try to push the boundaries, and lost sight of what the original style had been.”
With those origins somewhat obscured by the simultaneous arrival of the Cascadian Dark Ale, confusion over what the style was supposed to taste like spread. Some fell into the same traps that those before them had, ending up with messy and astringent beers, while others produced delicious, award-winning brews that didn’t necessarily help refine the style definitions.
Matt Brynildson, brewmaster at Firestone Walker, had tried many different versions without the style really “clicking”—he saw most Black IPAs as Americanized Porters that didn’t really fit in with the rest of his portfolio. But at events, and within the brewery, people started asking why Firestone Walker didn’t have a version of the new, trendy beer style. Brynildson felt forced to act. Intent on making a true IPA of it, he took the base of his new Double Jack and shuffled the jigsaw to make it fit together. For him it was missing a piece, and that piece was rye.
“When thinking about the style and what I had tasted up to that point, I still wasn’t convinced what the style was really aiming for,” he says. “I kept thinking about an aggressively dank hop character and what would complement those flavors and elevate the concept. Rustic spicy grains felt like a perfect amplifying element and connecting point for aggressively pungent hops.”
Released in 2012, Wookey Jack became a core beer and went on to win gold at the Great American Beer Festival three times. But by then the dark ages were already nearly over. For every person who fell in love with Sublimely Self-Righteous or Wookey Jack there were many more who scored the new releases on RateBeer and moved on. As Brynildson puts it, “It’s not often that you find a beer drinker whose daily pint is a Black IPA.”
Working out what people expected or wanted from Black IPA was one thing, but brewing one that drinkers wanted to come back to time and time again was quite another. Even if a brewery had managed to strike a balance and produce a genre-defining beer, a new craze was about to come and swallow the style up entirely.
“I think it’s too aggressive of a style for a lot of the younger generations’ tastes,” laments Kimmich.
He’s talking about Black IPA specifically, but he could easily be talking about traditional IPA more generally. He and Noonan had brewed the first modern Black IPA and the first New England IPA, and watched both styles go out into the world, only to come back irrevocably altered. While his darker style struggled for meaning, his lighter one took on an entirely new one.
Kimmich’s Heady Topper changes as its key hop Simcoe does each year, but it’s always citrusy, pithy, and dank, with a fierce hit of 70 IBUs on the finish. Those bold flavors are balanced by the hazy malt grist and now-famous, low-flocculating Conan yeast, which adds stone fruit notes and leaves haze in its wake. The brewers Heady inspired, however, were most excited about the last bit. Removing the bitterness barrier, amping up the nostalgic fruit flavors, and building an almost pillowy, creamy mouthfeel was enough to send the style across the world.
Meanwhile, after several years of plummeting sales volumes, Black IPAs started disappearing. Breweries faced increasing pressure to brew lighter and fruitier beers, and even the national brands weren’t immune. In 2015, Stone discontinued Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale, and in 2016 Firestone delisted Wookey Jack. In many cases, the sales just didn’t justify the tank space. But that’s not to say people weren’t disappointed.
“It’s funny, because when we discontinued Sublimely Self-Righteous I got a lot of angry people confronting me about it,” says Steele. “And my response was always the same: ‘When was the last time you bought one?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, it was a year ago.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s why.’”
While most beer geeks greeted the demise of Black IPA with indifference, there was a small but vocal minority that was devastated. After all, part of the style’s appeal was the way it combined two niche obsessions—heavy hops and roasted malts. If you loved both, there weren’t many ways to get your fix. One place you could still get both readily, however, was in the U.K.—right up to around 2017.
The peak of Black IPA happened to occur around the time that the British craft beer revolution was just starting. As a result, some of the country’s early leading lights—BrewDog, The Kernel, Beavertown Brewery, Magic Rock Brewing, Buxton Brewery—all had one in their core range, or at least brewed regular Black IPA seasonals. To British breweries opening in the early 2010s, having a Black IPA was proof that you were taking this “craft” thing seriously.
In the early days, the U.K.’s upstart craft brewers took their inspiration from travel, from muled bottles and, in the case of Black IPA, from one domestic beer: Thornbridge Brewery’s Wild Raven. That brew was conceived of by James Kemp, now head of beer development at BrewDog. Like Steele, he struggled with the first batch, but by the second could have been copying straight out of the Kimmich recipe book.
“You’re always right on the edge when brewing a Black IPA,” he says. “I was always trying to hide any roast. I’d use Carafa Special backed up with just a little bit of medium crystal to get big toffee and fruit, then use New World hops on top of them.”
In addition to that perceived sweetness, Kemp made sure his Black IPAs had high finishing gravities—up to 1.015—to balance any savory notes and astringency. As a result, many of the British beers that came in the wake of Wild Raven were big, richly aromatic Dark Ales with lots of sticky fruitiness but a bold, kettle-hopped finish.
One of the style’s biggest fans was homebrewer, author, and founder of Finchampstead’s Elusive Brewing, Andy Parker. He’d loved that tricky combination of flavors since tasting The Kernel’s Black IPA at the renowned Rake Bar in London Bridge in 2011. That night began an obsession with the style that led him to track down the beer that inspired that Kernel brew—21st Amendment Brewery’s Back in Black—on a trip to San Francisco. He brought cans home and used them as the basis of a post on his homebrew blog, Graphed Beer, in which he attempted to understand the core character of Black IPA.
“I don’t see the point of brewing an IPA and painting it black,” he says. “There’s the opportunity to get more layers of flavor than in a pale IPA. If you get the level of roast and the hops right, they are complementary. I don’t think they clash at all.”
Clearly the average British beer drinker disagreed, and while it happened a few years later than in the United States, Black IPA was drowned out in the U.K. by a tide of juicy, Hazy IPA. But even as the lights came up around 2017, Parker was already plotting its revival.
The return of Black IPA began in much the same vein as it ended—in disagreement. In the U.K., it seemingly started with a tweet by the Essex-based Solvay Society Brewing’s owner, Roman Hochuli, showing his dismay at seeing a glut of examples on the market, to which Parker responded with a challenge: “Tear up your brew schedules – it’s on! #bipacomeback.” The tweet itself barely got out of Parker’s own bubble, but for some reason the hashtag took on a life of its own.
“It kind of just stuck,” shrugs Parker, “and people keep tagging me with it too.”
Just like his original tweet, it was mostly a joke to start. Whenever a Black IPA was mentioned in the U.K., the original poster would hashtag it and smile wryly about craft beer’s fickle ways. Increasingly, however, it became a focal point for those searching out the style, and a lightning rod for those remembering the days when a madcap idea like Black IPA could fit into a brewery’s core range.
Soon, rumblings began about the style’s supposed renaissance. As a dark beer, Black IPA always sees a seasonal spike, but this winter saw not just a rise on earlier in the year, but double the number of Untappd check-ins compared to the winter before. Within a few months of each other, Firestone Walker upgraded its seasonal, small-batch release of Wookey Jack to the main kit, and Stone brought Sublimely Self-Righteous back from the dead. In a press release announcing the move, Stone said that Sublimely Self-Righteous was the most-requested rebrew in its history and that “We get ‘BRING BACK SSR’ comments on just about everything we post to socials.”
In the U.K., meanwhile, this winter saw the return of Thornbridge’s Wild Raven and Magic Rock’s Magic 8 Ball. Leading from the front was Parker, who has released a Black IPA, Black Rye IPA, Export India Stout, and American Brown Ale since the start of the year.
Clearly something has happened over the last year that has brought the idea of hoppy Dark Ale back to the front of brewers’ minds. Even Parker admits, however, that it’s probably not a hashtag.
“I do have a theory,” he says. “Before COVID the on-trade was always a gatekeeper between the consumer and the brewery. Now breweries are mostly going direct, the consumer can buy exactly what they want.”
Before COVID-19 struck, over 40% of beers sold in the U.K. went through pubs and restaurants. These businesses focus on high turnover to survive, so only specialist bars were willing to take on beers that sold slowly, or required more upselling. Now, though, over 60% of the U.K.’s breweries operate their own webshops (up from 37% in 2019). Not only does that remove the consideration of what sells by the pint, it encourages small-pack buyers to explore a wider range of breweries than what’s available at the bar or on the shelf. The recent increase in the number of curated beer subscription services and clubs, many opened by breweries themselves, has additionally allowed brewers and distributors greater control over what goes out to drinkers. In the U.S. the rise of variety packs has also offered brewers the opportunity to put new styles in front of drinkers who might have gotten stuck in a pattern.
There has to be something else going on here too, though, because there are plenty of styles more likely to fill our fridges than Black IPA. When ensuring volume and cash flow has never been more important to brewers, filling tanks with a beer famous for slow sales looks like commercial madness.
At first glance it’s almost impossible to comprehend why, with the world on its darkest revolution in half a century and beer sales falling off a cliff, hundreds of brewers have turned to a beer style that has become a buzzword for failure: 2,775 unique Black IPAs and Cascadian Dark Ales appeared on Untappd in January 2021 alone. Throwing some light on the situation reveals the reasons could lie in the style’s checkered past, and our yearning for it.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in freedoms we took entirely for granted being removed to keep us and our loved ones safe. In terms of our beer consumption, some drinkers have turned to local and national brands and trusted styles. That’s mainly down to the fact that these beers are the most accessible, but another element could be their connection to simpler pleasures and better times. As our worlds have gotten a little smaller, many have found escape in the past, from cravings for dishes not eaten since childhood to reruns of popular shows that offer a reminder of how we used to live.
In a 2020 study, Dr. Timothy Yu-Cheong Yeung examined how our music tastes have gone back in time. Picking six European countries across various infection levels, he analyzed 17 trillion plays on Spotify. He found that lockdown levels had a causal effect on how old the music people listened to was—consumption of songs over three years old peaked around six weeks after the introduction of new measures and took a while to fade away. In his conclusion, Yeung writes: “Psychological impacts of the pandemic may easily translate into change in consumption behaviors as rational individuals seek remedies to counter any adverse psychological distress. A potential cure is to acquire nostalgia, and a relatively cheap channel to achieve this goal is to listen to music of the ‘good old days.’”
If using happy memories as a salve works for music, it’s possible that the resurgent interest in Black IPA is down to its strong connection to a particular, simpler time. When the style was at its peak over a few short years, there were just over 2,000 breweries in the U.S. and barely 1,000 in the U.K. Most of them were small businesses serving their local communities, buying hops on spec and still scoping out new styles and recipes. RateBeer was where you reviewed beer, Blogger where you read about it, and taprooms were just hurriedly assembled benches and pallets. Everyone seemed to know everyone, so a tap takeover felt more like a school reunion than a press opportunity. Or at least that’s how it looks on this side of 2020. Nostalgia’s power is its ability to filter out the negatives, and twist memories to fit the narratives of the present.
“Maybe when people brew or drink Black IPA they want to remember 2009 or 2012, when brewing was a craft and we tried different things,” says Kemp.
If it’s a buzzword for a failed trend, Black IPA is also shorthand for experimentation and passion without the influence of commercialization. It’s an embodiment of that old craft cliche: that brewers brew what they like and are just delighted when it sells. To some, the disappearance of the style could be seen as the end of that era of innocence.
Kemp also hints at another example of nostalgia that he saw growing among beer drinkers even before the pandemic: a yearning for variety. Hazy IPA was in part a reaction to bracingly bitter West Coast IPAs, which served as a flavor barrier to new consumers and resulted in palate fatigue among brewers and drinkers alike. Ironically, the pervasiveness of sweeter, juicy IPA is now creating renewed demand for bitter IPA, a process that could be accelerated by post-COVID nostalgia. Parker has seen a rise in the number of people looking for that “West Coast hit” in his sales, while Steele says his brewery—New Realm Brewing Company in Atlanta, Georgia and Virginia Beach, Virginia—has seen an increase, too.
“We’re seeing little bits of interest in more traditional IPA styles,” he says. “I don’t think it’s going to overtake the Hazy IPA, but there’s still craft drinkers who would rather have something that was really popular 15 years ago.”
Steele is almost certainly right that Hazy IPA will continue to dominate the market for years to come, so perhaps the return of Black IPA isn’t so much a trend as an adjustment. Hazy IPA completely changed the craft beer scene in just a few short years, and it’s possible Black IPA would have had more time in the spotlight if Noonan’s other invention hadn’t stolen it. Maybe all we’ve done is reach out in the darkest times to find an old friend we’d lost touch with. If this glimmer of Black IPA doesn’t outlast the lockdowns, hopefully it has still brought a bit of light to those who need it.
“I’m a little skeptical whether it’s having a real renaissance,” says Brynildson. “But I Iove any excuse to pull out older recipes, dust them off, and get some of these beers back in the hands of the fans who miss them.”
Words by Jonny GarrettIllustrations by Tim Green
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