Johnny Osborne’s Deep Fried Beers brand, based in Athens, New York, is known especially for its big, intensely flavorful, hop-saturated hazy IPAs. And when Osborne first started collaborating with other breweries, they would look at his typical dry-hop loads and tell him he was crazy.
Fast-forward to today, and Osborne sees numbers like 10 pounds (4.5 kg) per barrel and beyond as being accepted as relatively normal practice. In his view, the reluctance to embrace higher hop loads in hazy IPA was more an obstacle of know-how than one of resources.
“We didn’t know how to condition beers with that much plant material in them,” he says, “and I think people are getting better at it.”
While West Coast styles and other clear IPAs have reestablished a kind of equilibrium in the United States, hazy IPA remains enduringly popular across the country. And brewers have yet to stop innovating and sharing advice on how to pack in increasingly vibrant, saturated hop character—all while preserving that necessary modicum of drinkability.
Here’s a look at how many of the most acclaimed brewers in that category are doing it today.
Using the Data and Sourcing the Best You Can Find
Osborne says he’s been struck by the chemical and sensory data that hop growers are making available these days—including spider charts, oil contents, and more. Brewers are making use of them.
Among them is Kevin Kowalski, head brewer at CLAG in Sandusky, Ohio. “It’s light years better than it was a decade ago,” Kowalski says. “You can get complete, detailed breakdowns of these hops.”
Kowalski says he often uses collaborations as an opportunity to get a peek at the hop lots his brewer friends are getting. “When they cut a bag open and it smells amazing, I’ll snap a pic of the lot and send it to my rep at YCH and ask if they have any more of it or another lot that is similar.” If his rep can’t get it, Kowalski says, he can usually get him something pretty close.
Osborne shares similar experiences: “More than ever before, it seems like they have the ability to give you really good technical information on a lot-by-lot basis.”
Ultimately, the first and most important step to brewing good hazy IPA is sourcing the highest-quality hops you can find, says Ben Clayton, owner and head brewer at the Test in Brooklyn, New York. “You want to identify lots that are really going to sing in the beer,” he says.
Osborne has another trick for obtaining quality hops: He looks at who’s selling them on the spot market. Through outlets such as Lupulin Exchange, he can look up bags of Citra and see who’s selling them. “Oh, it’s Tree House,” he says, offering an example. “I’m pretty sure their least favorite lot is better than anything I can get hold of.”
And even for some smaller breweries, securing contracts with suppliers remains a time-tested way to help ensure quality hops. Even at Deep Fried’s scale of about 350 barrels a year, Osborne says he can still make use of contracts—after all, the inputs for his hop-saturated beers are roughly equivalent to that of a 2,000-barrel brewery. He currently contracts with Yakima Chief Hops and is working on getting set up with New Zealand’s Freestyle.
It can be harder for smaller breweries to get hop contracts that make sense at their scale—but it is possible, and many suppliers are increasingly flexible for smaller customers. CLAG contracts with one such supplier. “Freestyle Hops is good about smaller allotments on contract,” Kowalski says, “and I think they’re some of the best hops in the world.”
Varieties, Blends, and Accents
New Zealand hops continue to have an outsized impact on the composition of American hazy IPAs and pale ales.
The Test’s Clayton says that some of the best hops he can get are coming from New Zealand. “Nelson, Riwaka, and Motueka are the main colors in our crayon box,” he says. (For much more on working with these varieties, see The Brewer’s Guide to New Zealand Hops.)
When it comes to New Zealand hops, Nelson Sauvin is Osborne’s lead dog. He says the early-harvest lots have been more true to type for what he wants: excellent citrus and juicy Sauvignon Blanc grape notes. “The hop with the most expressiveness, with the most ‘stuff going on,’ might not be the version of the hop that’s the most unique or distinguishable,” he says.
The ever-popular Citra is another heavy lifter for Deep Fried. Osborne says that he looks for late-season lots—especially those that have big, bright, punchy lemon notes. He often uses other hops to add accents to that Citra, typically including three to six different varieties in almost every IPA. “I don’t always bother to list them all because some are small contributors,” he says.
Osborne usually starts with a primary hop—such as Citra or Nelson Sauvin—that will make up about half his hop load. Then he thinks about filling in the gaps with varieties that add other elements—aiming for what he refers to as “multitudes of flavor.” Those elements are often more classic Pacific Northwest–type qualities—dank, pine, and deep grapefruit. “To an extent, they are not considered the ideal for hazy IPA, but I like my beer more when it has some of that,” he says. If he has a tropical-heavy lot of Citra, he might add some Simcoe to the mix to help bring that dank character to the table.
At Parish in Broussard, Louisiana, head brewer Ryan Speyrer and his team also use a lot of Citra. Parish’s flavorful IPAs are highly regarded—its flagship Ghost in the Machine double IPA was one of Craft Beer & Brewing’s Best 19 Beers in 2019—and the brewery has been known for such beers for more than a decade. Today, Parish brews about 8,000 barrels of Ghost in the Machine per year and growing—roughly a third of the brewery’s production.
Brewing at that scale demands a level of consistency that smaller outfits don’t need to match. “We have a house flavor that we prefer,” Speyrer says, and they aim for that profile at hop selection. Lo and behold, they often end up choosing the same lots. “We’re blindly selecting the same exact farm and, oftentimes, the same exact field.”
With Citra, Speyrer says they’re chasing pungent, punchy character. Parish also contracts a lot of Cascade; he says the team looks for a deep, bright grapefruit flavor.
At the Test, Clayton says he’s also been inspired by specific hop farms. “I have a big soft spot for John Segal’s hops—his Cascade, his newer varieties like Anchovy, Tangier, and Zumo.”
Clayton also says Citra is the Test’s most-used hop. “It has an incredible ability to stand on its own and shine as a single-hop beer while also playing well with almost every other hop,” he says. “It can be the star or the support.” He compares Citra to a squeeze of lime at the end of a recipe—a bright touch that lifts all the other flavors.
CLAG’s Kowalski also alludes to culinary connections while describing how he uses different hops to amplify others. For example, he compares including a bit of Chinook in a juice-bomb IPA to baking a cake and adding a pinch of salt. “The cake is sweet, but the salt boosts everything around it,” he says. Likewise, with Galaxy: “I don’t like the diesel quality in it, but I find that a little bit of Galaxy amplifies everything around it.”
The Hot Side, and Hot Hop Products
Especially in hazy IPAs, it’s become popular among brewers to add little or no hops on the hot side, instead loading up the whirlpool and dry hop.
Kowalski is among the brewers who don’t subscribe to that line of thought. He says there’s real value in having a reasonably sized hot-side addition of, say, 10 to 15 IBUs. “These are still IPAs,” he says. “You have to treat them like IPAs.”
In his view, hazy IPAs that lack a hot-side addition tend to fall off pretty quickly. “You want it to still drink like an IPA, not like fermented malt water with great aromatics.”
His usual way is to add another 10 to 15 IBUs of hops at flameout before hitting the beer with a typical 180°F (82°C) whirlpool charge. He favors a balanced approach with those whirlpool charges, mixing in DynaBoost or Cryo pellets (or both) with T-90s. “You want a little bit of everything, not a single note,” he says.
And while Parish has been honing its techniques and processes for about a decade, there is one area of recent change: hop products. “We’re using more Cryo and LupoMAX today,” Speyrer says. The primary benefit of those products, he says, is higher yield without a dip in quality. “You can go pretty liberal with Cryo,” he says, suggesting that replacing up to half the T-90 pellet-load with Cryo is fine.
Osborne also likes to get some of the newer hop products into his beers—but for Deep Fried, it’s not necessarily about yield or efficiency. “I find that they’re intrinsically better at delivering some of that breadth of character,” he says.
At CLAG, Kowalski urges caution when using some of the newer products. “They work really well, but I think there’s a harmonious balance between plant material and the hop oils,” he says.
A musician, Kowalski compares beers heavy in hop oils to playing a song with a single note the entire time—instead, he prefers to play a power chord. “We’ll use T-90 with DynaBoost, or Cryo with T-90,” he says. The T-90 pellets can take more conditioning time to harmonize, but Kowalski says he prefers to use a mix of products. “I think everybody is looking for this magic bullet where it’s this aroma bomb and you save on yield, and I don’t think that exists yet,” he says. “I think you need to have a balance between these old and new products to get exactly what you’re looking for.”
Kowalski also has found ways to get the most from products such as DynaBoost. When he used to pour that into the whirlpool, he noticed that seemingly half of it would still be stuck to the walls of the kettle after knockout. Now, his method is to pull a barrel of beer into a one-barrel Ss Brewtech tank, alongside the boil kettle, and carefully stir the DynaBoost into the wort. Then he’ll seal it, pressurize with CO2, and dose it inline through his heat exchanger when knocking out to the fermentor.
On the cold side, Kowalski has another nifty piece of equipment: a hop mixer. He credits Russian River with inspiring the project; he took an old serving tank, had a mixer welded inside of it, and added a hop doser with a four-inch valve to the top. He purges everything, then adds hops to the doser, shooting them into the mixer one bag at a time, along with ALDC enzyme (to prevent any hop creep–driven diacetyl).
Kowalski runs that mixer on its lowest speed for half an hour. “Then we put a ton of pressure on it and shoot it back into the tank,” he says. Initially, the results were grassy and vegetal because of the added utilization. After reducing the load by about a pound (454 g) per barrel, the results have been more to his liking.
Grains, Structure, and Haze
Hops get most of the attention in hazy IPAs and pale ales, but building a structure to handle those intense flavors is imperative.
The hazy IPAs of yesteryear were often sweeter and had higher finishing gravities. If not brewing doubles or triples, many of the leading pros today are targeting finishing gravities around 3°P (1.012) or slightly higher. Even double IPAs might end up at 3–4°P (1.012–1.016). Drinkability is the focus.
“The whole purpose is for somebody to order a second one of those beers,” Kowalski says.
Grain selection depends on the brewer’s priorities. At the Test, Clayton likes to consider heritage and heirloom grains that might not have much of a toehold in brewing yet. Success isn’t guaranteed, he says, but it can sometimes work wonders.
“The unsung hero in hazy IPA is the oats,” he says. “It’s something that I don’t think enough people talk about.”
Clayton previously ran the bar program at Blue Hill at Stone Farms, a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City’s Greenwich Village. “Our chef, Dan Barber, became somewhat obsessed with this heirloom oat variety that is more akin to what our great-grandparents would’ve eaten,” he says. Those oats have much higher fat and protein content than what’s found in typical, modern oats. “It’s almost like a vanilla milkshake,” he says. “And when you steep them, you get something that looks more like a full-fat double cream, versus something like skim milk.”
Clayton says he sources oats from Paul’s Muesli, and he also trials new varieties from Row 7 Seeds.
At Root and Branch in Long Island, New York, cofounder and head brewer Anthony Sorice approaches his beers with three primary variables in mind: “It’s all about striking a harmonious balance [among] bitterness, residual sugar, and pH,” he says. While he takes readings and notes, his palate is really what leads the way. “A lot of that was trial and error—if you don’t have a good palate, you most likely will not make good beer.”
In hop-forward beers—even big, flavorful hazies—Sorice says he strives for drinkability. “A lot of people love our 8 to 10 percent [ABV] hoppy beer because they drink like they’re 5 percent,” he says. “Conversely, a lot of people love our 5 to 6.5 percent hoppy beer because they retain the flavor and intensity of something that is 8 to 10 percent.”
It was saison that originally drew Sorice to brewing. A big part of brewing mixed-culture saisons, he says, is creating a wort that’s rich in protein and dextrins to endure the intense fermentation brought forth by wild yeast and bacteria. “That’s how a beer that finishes near 0°P (1.000) retains any sort of mouthfeel,” he says, adding that wheat and oats are great for that purpose.
Sorice has fully embraced those grains for Root and Branch’s hazy IPAs, which have some of the highest adjunct percentages around. “My hoppy beer bases are a nightmare to work with,” he says. He uses four or five different types of oats and wheat in a recipe, making up anywhere from 65 to 75 percent of the total grist.
While Parish uses oats, Speyrer says there are pathways via an all-barley grist to retaining that desirable mouthfeel and structure that’s important in a well-attenuated hazy. “You aim for a slightly higher protein content,” he says. Specifically, he references a storage protein that’s abundant in barley: “It’s the hordeins that are binding with the polyphenols to create those haze complexes.”
Chit malt can be effective, too, but Speyrer says he’s also had success using all base malt. He cautions against kettle finings that could drop the proteins out of the beer. “As long as you can carry them into the fermentor and throw enough hops in there, you’ll get haze,” he says.
Whirlpool hops also add some of the beer’s structure and mouthfeel, he says. “You’ll get binding happening on the hot side,” he says. “You can make it happen.” He also advises not playing around with your yeast. “Just use London,” he says. “Stop trying to be super-creative with other yeasts.”
At CLAG, Kowalski also observes the impact that hops can have on the body of hazy IPA.
“In some of these doubles that we hammer with whirlpool hops, the resinous flavor of the hops gives it a body without having to just rely on sugar content or even oats,” he says. “If we’re releasing a triple IPA that finishes in the high 4°P range [1.016–1.019], but you get that hop saturation on your tongue, it feels heavier than it really is.”
Finding the Next Edge
While brewers are always trying new things and looking for new ideas that might improve their hazies just one more notch, there can be a fairly rapid adoption curve once they land on something that works well.
Kowalski says he’s noticed—especially from doing collabs—that most of the leading brewers are using similar processes, albeit with slight variations.
“We’re all using the same hops, we essentially all have the same dry-hopping practices,” he says. “But when somebody does something slightly different, you kind of open your eyes and ask, ‘Why are you doing it that way?’
“And they explain it to you, and you’re either on board with what they’re doing, or you’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not doing that.’”