IPA on the World Stage (Summer 2025)

If you find kettle-acidification to be intimidating, this Berliner weisse is a great way to start learning the process and thus expand your repertoire as a brewer.

From our Love Handles files on our favorite spots in the world to enjoy a beer: This New Orleans deli and market draws crowds for its sandwiches, personality, and surprising selection of cans and bottles.

This international-style dark lager works well on its own as an easy-drinking crowd-pleaser—but it also works well as a relatively base for fruit or other flavor additions.

With its clear and pale look, juicy hop flavors, and balancing bitterness, bright IPA has become an emerging style in New Zealand. This recipe from Mount Brewing in Mount Maunganui showcases an experimental hop as well as Motueka and Nectaron.

From Eliott Menzies and his team at Altitude Brewing in Queenstown, New Zealand, here’s a recipe for their NZ IPA that won gold in the Juicy/Hazy category at the 2023 New Zealand Beer Awards.

Intense, complex, and punchy, the hops of New Zealand are special—so, making the best beer you can with them deserves some special consideration. From Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud—or Middle Earth, if you prefer—here are specific tips from the brewers who know New Zealand hops best.

From our Love Handles files on the world’s great beer bars: In the home of Bollywood, local fans of craft beer and burgers dance for this casual, cozy outpost.

Fork & Brewer’s all-Riwaka take on New Zealand’s signature beer style is clean and crisp, with a lean malt base that allows the pronounced tropical-hop character to truly shine.

In the world of brewing, we can precisely measure and define certain things—and those things don’t have a whole lot to do with how we smell, taste, and feel about beer.

From the Hércules brewery in Querétaro, Mexico, here’s the lowdown on Pueblito, the export stout that won gold at the 2024 World Beer Cup—including the brewery’s German-inspired method for bottle-conditioning, which kept the beer in top form at the judging table.

Ashleigh Carter, cofounder of Denver’s Bierstadt Lagerhaus, focuses solely on lager in her own brewing, and she’s drawn to those with similarly singular approaches. Her chosen six-pack honors intentional commitment to a style, to a single beer, to presentation, and to experience.

From Dundulis in Panevežys, Lithuania, this recipe is based on their interpretation of traditional keptinis beer brewed from an oven-­baked mash.

There are many kinds of dark beer around the world, but there’s one that stands out as profoundly different from the others—and it features a deep, caramelized flavor that can only come from a nice, hot oven.

This lush, Riwaka-heavy IPA was a collab that linked the American East Coast with New Zealand’s South Island.

In recent years, the brewing world has learned a lot about terpenes, thiols, biotransformation, survivables, and more. Now, let’s zoom out to consider the essence of hop aroma—the oils that contain all those compounds—and make sense of them in a way that any brewer can use.

From our Love Handles files on beer bars we love: Hip but unpretentious, the Dirty Truth in central Massachusetts draws a crowd of students and bartenders there for a stacked selection of local lagers, saisons, Belgian gueuze, and more.

Featuring dried shrimp, salted crabs, fish sauce, fresh lime juice, tamarind paste, tomatoes, peanuts, and bird’s eye chiles, this one’s not for vegetarians... or anyone with a peanut allergy... or a shellfish allergy... or anyone who doesn’t like “spicy.” But that’s Thai food for you.

This fresh, vibrant, spicy Thai dish is a powerhouse of flavor, from its lime-driven acidity to its fiery chiles, crunchy peanuts, and briny little sea creatures. Should you put it in beer? Yes, obviously, you cowards.

Here’s how homebrewers can punch up their pale ales with the bright flavors of New Zealand hops. Plus: a method for getting a whirlpool-like flavor burst without having to whirl anything.

These IPAs have followed their own evolutionary paths, embracing body alongside hops for smooth intensity.

From Shawn Cooper and Joran Van Gingerachter of Atlanta’s Halfway Crooks, here’s a recipe for their own “brewer’s beer”—a dry, bitter, quenching pale ale packed with Belgian-grown hops and accentuated by careful yeast expression.

Taking cues from modern Belgian pale ales such as Taras Boulba and XX Bitter, Sanguine is a balanced expression of ample hops and yeast character. “We chased this beer for four years, trying to find the flavor profile,” says Halfway Crooks cofounder Shawn Cooper. “This is where we ended up.”

Jeremy Pryes, founder and head brewer at Pryes in Minneapolis, says they give this beer its regional designation “because of its distinct balance between the hops used and the sweetness from the malt.”

Ope! Midwest IPA is just gonna sneak right past the two coastal substyles as a unique approach all its own, rooted in modern tradition while evolving for the future.

From beer-baron bobbleheads to bespoke barrel-aged blends, here are a few recs from our editors.

Technically, this cold-fermented showcase of expressive Czech aroma hops—brewed by the folks at Sacred Profane in Biddeford, Maine—is a lager. But it drinks like an IPA, so that’s what they call it.

Saaz, Kazbek, and ... Juno? Whether punching up lagers or adding interest to IPAs, newer Czech hop varieties—little known outside their country—are an overlooked source of distinctive flavors.

Here’s a recipe based on advice from a few of the best in the industry at brewing great, juicy IPAs with haze that sticks around.

Looking to brew a beer with haze that’s ready to commit to the long-term? We asked Zach Coleman, head brewer and co-owner at TRVE in Denver and Asheville, for some clarity on haze stability, and he turned to fellow pros for their best advice.

From Upright Brewing in Portland, Oregon, here’s a recipe for their light, easy-drinking saison that features a citrus-tropical fruit character balanced by yeast-driven earth and spice.

While modern brewers continue to push the creative envelope with their evolving takes on farmhouse beers, there is nothing quite like the old-fashioned Wallonian ales that inspired them in the first place.

In this yearly update, we plot the moves in the Brewers Association’s top 50 craft brewers by production volume, from 2007 to the present. To simplify the data and make it easier to follow, we fast-forward from 2007 to 2017 and pick up from there.