Bright & Juicy & Bitter & Soft IPA (August-September 2021)

From his Make Your Best series, here’s Josh Weikert’s recipe for a delicate yet flavorful Scottish-style light ale—including an extract version.

It used to be notoriously difficult to cook with American IPA—it was bitter and challenging—but the continuing evolution of this growing family of styles has created new opportunities for compatibility in the kitchen.

Inspired by Saison Cazeau, here is a recipe for a light, dry, farmhouse-style ale that gets a sweet-smelling lift from fresh fleurs de sureau.

Floral, fruity, and unique, fresh elderflowers smell like the finest hops you’ve never smelled—because those hops don’t exist yet.

From our Love Handles department for beer bars we love: In Kailua, Hawaii, the Aloha State’s first self-pour bar doubles as a community nonprofit.

Nutrients designed for for hard seltzer fermentation and a non-diastatic saison strain, for better brewing through chemistry.

From our Love Handles department for beer bars we love: This warm, eccentric pub in Poland is ideal for settling in and getting to know the work of independent Polish brewers.

Courtesy of Oliver Wesseloh, brewer and founder of Kehrwieder Kreativbrauerei in Hamburg, Germany, this single-hopped IPA goes all-in on Callista.

Feed your brains! From vegetarian cooking (and pairing) with beer to brewing with cannabis to local beer-history deep-dives, here are some books we enjoyed this year.

From our Love Handles department for beer bars we love: In Bellefontaine, Ohio, this small-town hub for local beer lovers also attracts city folk who want to get out of town for a great pint.

This strong ale leans into British ingredients and London ale yeast for a robust but elegant brew that also serves ably as a winter warmer.

We found this digital hydrometer to be a snap to use, encouraging more diligent monitoring of our fermentations.

This old-school Cascadian dark ale embraces piney Chinook hops in Sasquatchian proportions. Don’t worry about the IBUs—this should end up relatively balanced, with enough malt and hop flavors and aroma to provide depth for the bitterness.

Maybe that P in IPA can stand for “pitch-black.” Once again helping us to extract the most characterful beer from extract brewing, Annie Johnson has the details on Cascadian dark ale, aka American black ale or black IPA.

This Burke-Gilman take on a Czech-style dark lager is inspired by the legendary beer served at U Fleků in Prague.

The idea is simple: an IPA that relies on German ingredients—especially the country’s distinctive aroma hops. Does it exist? Yes. Is it rare? Also, yes. Josh Weikert digs into the German and U.S. beer scenes to find out why—and to get the blueprints.

The brewmaster of Firestone Walker in Paso Robles, California, lays out the brewery’s methodical approach to blending hops for elevated flavors and aromas in distinctive IPAs.

Fruit-forward, soft, hazy, juicy, pillowy—whatever your adjectives, this is for sure: These IPAs have captured the flavor imagination of a still-growing number of beer drinkers. Here, five pros share their top picks.

Courtesy of Luc Lafontaine of Godspeed in Toronto, this unusual IPA recipe represents a fusion of influences. (It also includes tips for extracting flavor and aroma from green tea without unwanted tannins.)

Toronto’s Godspeed Brewery is a reflection of founder-brewer Luc Lafontaine’s life and obsessions, from reverently brewed traditional lagers to IPAs and goses that showcase unusual Japanese ingredients.

From bright and classic to tropical and crisp and various combinations thereof, these West Coast or American IPAs reflect the past and future trajectory of the style. Five pros offer up their favorites.

Randy Mosher dissects the intricate workings of IPAs—from the malt to the hop compounds that make them special and compelling—so we can approach our brews and our sensory vocabulary with deeper thought.

With three cheeses, fresh tomatoes, jalapeños, chorizo, and IPA, this is definitely not your neighbor’s Ro-Tel-and-Velveeta cheese dip.

This recipe is inspired by Lithuania’s unique farmhouse ales—including those of Aldona Udriené’s Jovaru Alus, of Julius Simonaitis, and others. This is a great starting point for experimenting with raw ale, hop tea, or baking the mash for keptinis.

Whether “raw” and unboiled, bittered with hop tea, or made from a mash baked into crusty loaves, Lithuanian farmhouse ales represent a distinct tradition of comforting beers that can’t be found anywhere else.

Courtesy of the brewing team at Burke-Gilman in Seattle, here is a homebrew-scale recipe for the double hazy IPA that won GABF gold in 2020.

Incremental improvements are paying off big for Seattle’s Burke-Gilman. Fresh off Alpha King and Great American Beer Festival gold medals for their double IPAs, the team aims to push their whole range to the next level.

Pushing IPA to its furthest physical limits requires close attention to fermentation and a lot of—well, a lot of everything. Thanks go to Paul Sangster and Rip Current Brewing for this unusual recipe.

Brewing a great higher-gravity IPA demands more from you than simply going bigger. The ingredients and their tendencies are all against you doing this and making it drinkable—but it can be done. Here’s your battle plan, based on advice from the pros.

Some brew systems make beer for us to drink. Others just solve mysteries—providing an acceptable outlet for failure and serving as the lifeblood of craft beer. John M. Verive is on the case.

From award-winning homebrewer and Craft Beer & Brewing contributor Annie Johnson, this elegant single-malt-single-hop beer can spotlight any hop you want—in this case, Zappa, which can boldly express tropical fruit, mint, spices, citrus, and pine.

These characterful, high-efficiency, drought-resistant hop varieties present both challenges and opportunities to hop farmers—and to brewers.

The founder and brewer of Chicago’s Keeping Together selects an experience-driven six-pack that transports her back to cherished moments in time.

Courtesy of New Image founder Brandon Capps, here is a homebrew-scale recipe for Pure Isolate, a hazy double IPA that makes use of liquid hop terpenes.

Brewers are in the early days of experimenting with liquid hop terpenes—incredibly potent isolates of aromatic compounds that can deliver a big boost to the IPA bouquet.

Your favorite hazy-juicy pale ale or IPA gets into the batter to brighten up a fried fish filet, while spicy sumac plays a similar role in the mayo.

Following the golden path of modern festbier, this homebrew-scale recipe is closely based on Counter Weight’s GABF gold medal winner.

Whatever its strength, whatever its story, and whatever its color—amber or gold?—festbier ought to be drinkable in quantity. Here we dissect the diverging styles to find out what makes a great (Oktober)festbier tick.