Scotty Hargrave will be the first to tell you that he didn’t invent the XPA. However, it seems pretty clear that he reinvented it, and he gave it definition.
That happened through Balter XPA, a beer that began as Hargrave’s fine-tuned homebrew then blew up into a runaway success. It inspired many others and arguably elevated XPA to become Australia’s signature craft-beer style.
Hargrave joined Balter in 2015, when the well-funded, celebrity-backed brand was still getting off the ground. That same year, he picked up two Australian International Beer Awards medals—for lager and pale ale—for Byron Bay Brewery in New South Wales. But even while brewing at Byron Bay—and before that, at Stone & Wood’s nearby production brewery—he was pottering at home, brewing trial batches on weekends.
After a few years of brewing Stone & Wood’s all-Galaxy, semihazy Pacific Ale—another influential beer in Australia—Hargrave wanted to brew and drink something different.
“I was just dabbling and trying to make some different beers to what I was doing at work,” Hargrave says. “And I started to see the Citras and Mosaics and all these newer American hops make their way to Australia, but we weren’t really using a lot of them. Stone & Wood was just all about Galaxy, obviously, and at one point I was probably throwing more Galaxy into more tanks than anybody else on the planet. So, I wasn’t looking to brew with that so much.”
He knew he wanted to brew with some of the newer hops, but—especially in Byron Bay’s warm, subtropical climate—he also knew that he didn’t want to brew big IPAs around 7 percent ABV. So, he asked himself, “‘Can I make a beer that has all of this great new-school hop flavor but is not overwhelming, and have the bitterness balanced but still punchy, and allow the beer to clean up nicely and be refreshing, and, you know, sit in a manageable ABV for our climate?’
“That’s where XPA came into being for me.”
There already were a few XPAs in Australia when Balter’s launched in 2016. However, like earlier American “extra pale ales,” they were coppery, caramelly, and often sitting around 6 percent ABV—more “extra-ale” than “extra-pale.” Hargrave knew he wanted the latter.
“That’s why I kept this one really lean and clean and dry and light in color,” he says. “Climate played a big part in that, having a beer that allowed this hop expression and experience but [didn’t] just bash you around and overwhelm you.” In the summer, when it gets up to 100°F (38°C) and 98 percent humidity, “you can get walloped pretty easy if you’re drinking really big beers.”
Hargrave left Balter in 2025 after a decade there, but by then its XPA had popularized the style and won a slew of awards. It also inspired a few American brewers who’ve sought out Hargrave for advice. They include Firestone Walker brewmaster Matt Brynildson, and they include Blake Masoner, cofounder of Craft Coast Beer & Tacos in San Diego’s North County. In the past few years, both breweries have won major medals for their XPAs.
Before we dive into the details, here are the basic pillars of XPA, as envisioned by Hargrave:
- The ABV is low- to mid-range, around 4.5 to 5 percent.
- It should have an (extra-)pale grist and dry finish, with the base malts and mash regime driving high attenuation.
- Bitterness should be balanced—perhaps 30 to 35 IBUs on paper—with hot-side additions stretching from first wort through whirlpool.
- There should be plenty of hop aroma and flavor—typically floral and fruity.
- The fermentation profile is clean, typically via an American ale yeast (but Hargrave says a lager strain could work as well).
- Mouthfeel is soft despite the crisp, dry finish.
The XPA is a relatively simple beer, Hargrave says, but it’s also detail-oriented—he describes it as a modern pale ale brewed with German precision. He always step-mashes his XPA, and the kettle additions matter. So does water—typically a balanced chloride-sulfate ratio, essentially splitting the difference between hazy and West Coast styles.
All those details contribute to a sensory experience that’s as pleasing as it is alluring.
“What I get is that initial generous, hoppy, rounded mouthfeel that takes you on a bit of a journey across the palate,” he says, “but it dries out and almost has a lager finish to it. And that was one of the things really early on that people would be saying to me: ‘It’s like this tropical session IPA that finishes like a lager.’”
Malt, Extra-Pale
Craft Coast’s Masoner was brewing at Pizza Port’s Bressi Ranch production facility in Carlsbad, California, when he met Hargrave and became infatuated with Balter XPA.
“When I had that beer for the first time,” Masoner says, “it was like, ‘Okay, I need to reverse-engineer this thing in my own brain. But I know the guy that makes it, so I could ask him how to do it.’”
Masoner calls Hargrave both a sensei and a friend, and he was a frequent source of feedback as Masoner was developing Craft Coast XPA. It took about 10 iterations to land on a version that both he and Hargrave agreed was worthy of the style—and it went on to win bronze at the 2024 World Beer Cup, and silver the next year.
It’s now a core beer for Craft Coast. They recently canned it for the first time, “just because that’s what we all love and believe in,” Masoner says. It’s the beer the team loves to drink, “and now they’ve been flying.”
So, when Hargrave and Masoner join me for a transoceanic video call to talk XPA, I’m prepared for the conversation to go in any number of directions. What I don’t expect—as we pick apart the inner workings of such a lean, pale, hop-forward beer—is for them to spend so much time talking about malt.
In Masoner’s view, if you’re going to learn from the archetype of a style, you should start from the materials that those who brewed it used. Balter XPA is one such archetype, and it’s made with Australian malt.
“That is the foundation of the beer,” Masoner says. “Maybe the water is the foundation of all life, but when it comes to beer, the malt is the foundation that we lean on. So, I sourced some malt that’s grown in Australia, and that’s what our XPA is built on.”
It’s not merely a symbolic gesture. Hargrave and Masoner make the case that some of the paler Australian base malts tend to have more diastatic power than their North American counterparts. That greater enzymatic activity leads to higher attenuation—and to the drier finish they want in an XPA.
Masoner likes the results so much that Craft Coast is now using the Aussie base malts for its West Coast IPAs and similar ale styles. “We tried a million different base malts, and then once I got hold of the XPA malt, it kind of turned into one of those things: ‘All right, let’s move some of those West Coast IPAs to that.’ And now, consistently across the board, we’re just drier, we’re more drinkable.”
While at Balter, Hargrave says, they would often have malts with very high DP scores on the specs. “They’re really ‘hot,’ we would call them,” he says. “So, they convert really quick. And they’ve got so much diastatic power, they could convert a cardboard box. … I developed that recipe to the point where I’d have to temper it with a bit of Munich malt, or a bit of Carapils, to stop it being so dry and thin that it became harsh or, you know, a bit bony.” Another addition that he’d use to soften things up: Australian wheat malt.
Besides the highly fermentable malt, Hargrave says he’s always used a multistep mash. He likes to mash in at 126°F (52°C) because he’s found it helps head retention. From there, he’d typically do steps at 151–154°F (66–68°C), another at 162–163°F (72–73°C), and then up to 171°F (77°C) for mash out. “And for whatever reason, it just worked ridiculously well,” Hargrave says of that regime. He believes it also helped the fermentation profile as well as the stability of Balter XPA’s light haze. “I think there were good reasons to do it.”
Craft Coast’s two brewhouses, meanwhile, are designed for single infusion, and Masoner says that’s worked just fine for their XPA. Besides the Aussie pilsner malt, Masoner says they include some wheat malt to help with head retention.
Whatever the grist, the idea is to have a low-color base and a dry finish—and there’s no need to add sugar. Hargrave, a frequent visitor to California over the years, says he often meets brewers who add sucrose to drive attenuation in West Coast IPAs. “Why do you need to do that to make it that dry?” he asks. “With the Australian malt, you don’t because it’s so dry you don’t necessarily have to do that.”
Bitterness: Firm but Balanced
Balter XPA sits around 30 to 32 IBUs. The style can handle more, but it should never be harsh.
That bitterness also needs structure that a big whirlpool charge cannot provide—kettle hops are important to the style. Hargrave says he’s also a big believer in first-wort hops.
“What I’ve always done is spread it right across—from a hot-side point of view—the entire kettle time,” he says. He’d typically add hops at first wort; at 60, 15, and 10 minutes left in the boil; and then at whirlpool. “That’s how you get that full, saturated hop flavor without any hollowed-out bits, without any dips, without any big slaps in the face. … For me, when you can intertwine the flavor with the bittering characteristic is when beer really is at its best.”
Masoner says his own tinkering has led to the same conclusion: Kettle hops are important for beer flavor, not to mention shelf life. He tried hopping only at first wort and with a big whirlpool charge. “And I realized that my beers after a month, if they were still on tap, tasted like absolutely nothing because they had no backbone left.”
Masoner took that spread-out approach to kettle hops and found that it also improved other beers. “XPA really redefined the way that I approached West Coast IPA,” he says. “It needs a diversity, a bitterness-to-flavor-to-aroma balance. … It took a lot of refining to get there.”
Those hot-side hops establish a foundation, Masoner says, “so that by the time you go to dry hop, you just pull a sample off the tank and you’re like, ‘Okay, what more does it need?’ You’re not guessing anymore. You built a foundation. … ‘I’ve got this really nice beer. It’s perfectly in my IBU range. It’s already got good flavor, good aroma. All I have to do is add some bouquet arrangement to complete the whole thing.’”
The Bouquet Arrangement: Punchy… but Also Balanced
There’s always room for interpretation, but XPA as envisioned by Hargrave features a combination of floral and tropical-fruit aroma driven by modern hops. Where those hops were grown and picked is less important.
There is no rule that XPA needs hops from Down Under. There is no rule that it can’t have American hops. Yet it often has both.
At Firestone Walker, Brynildson says he sees thiol-driven tropical flavor—the kind you often get from Australian and New Zealand aroma hops—as important to the style. Firestone XPA appeared in 2023 and immediately won a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival. It’s now a seasonal offering exclusive to mixed packs.
Since the beer launched “and we have had some time with it,” Brynildson says, “I feel even more strongly that what should in large part define this style is Southern Hemisphere hop character.” As a friend of Hargrave’s, Brynildson knows the style began partly as a way to get away from Australian Galaxy. “But from my vantage point, this beer style came from Down Under and should have an element of New World [or] Southern Hemisphere hops, preferably thiol-rich cultivars—whether they are Australian, New Zealand, or U.S. It should give that thiol-punch impression.”
Brynildson mentions the recently named Thora—with its sweeter notes of passion fruit, guava, and stone fruit, plus a dank edge—as an example of a U.S. hop that could have the same impact. XPA, he says, “often works best with a blend of Pacific Northwest and Southern Hemisphere hops, but that thiol kick makes it for me,” he says.
Balter XPA, notably, is hopped almost entirely with Pacific Northwest varieties: Amarillo, Centennial, Citra, and Mosaic. (Hargrave says there’s another “X factor”: a German hop for bittering.) Aromatically, what he’s aiming for is a profile that’s floral as well as tropical—and there are different ways to get there. “There are hops from all over the world that can suit it,” he says.
An XPA could be the place to meld some of the “more refined” tropical-fruit flavors of Pacific Northwest hops with the “rawer,” “wilder,” Southern Hemisphere varieties, he says. “And that’s maybe where the new frontier is.”
Breweries will have their own preferred methods on the cold side, but Hargrave says he always dry hopped XPA twice—the first time around Day 5, once the gravity had dropped below 3°P (1.012), and the second time at least 48 hours later. The Balter team would then wait at least 72 hours before crashing. Hargrave started using that method as a way to mitigate hop creep—even before he knew what it was. It worked “because I was leaving enough time in between the dry hops, and then between the second dry hop and the chill-back, for it to finish.”
At Craft Coast, meanwhile, Masoner has found that one late dry-hop charge works best on their system—at or near terminal gravity, then giving it enough time to clear diacetyl. “Then you just dump all of that together and start cold conditioning.”
Masoner initially was dry hopping twice, per Hargrave’s program. But he says moving to one dry-hop load may have been the most important “X factor” in getting his XPA to where he wanted it. “We didn’t lose aroma, we didn’t sacrifice flavor or bitterness, and now we’ve given ourselves enough time for that beer to clear out and mature before we need to transfer it to the brite,” he says. “That was where XPA really turned the corner at Craft Coast: hitting an early enough dry hop so that the beer can condition longer on the back end.”
The floral quality is important to Hargrave. “I want it to smell perfumy,” he says. “I want it to smell like my wife, in a way, like she’s all dressed up and taking me out to dinner. … It’s that constant evolution in the glass that also makes it so interesting to people that aren’t brewers or beer nerds or really especially knowledgeable. I think a big part of [its] success here in Australia was that people loved drinking this beer, but they didn’t even really know why. But subconsciously, it was pushing all these sensory buttons in their heads.”
It’s also possible to go too far with some of the newer, modern varieties that feature “sweeter,” candy-like aromatics often regarded as crowd-pleasers.
“I’ve tried a few that have tasted very much like raspberry Jell-O,” Hargrave says. “And when those beers really don’t work is where you’ve got a really intensely candied sweet character with a really prickly, ugly bitterness. You get this really horrible clash in the beers.” That’s a reminder, he says, that more isn’t always more. And balance is “absolutely central to everything” in an XPA. “That’s the name of the game, right there.”
Yet that kind of balance doesn’t mean it needs to be restrained in terms of complexity.
“I’d crack a can of XPA off the line, ... and the first thing I’d want to smell is this beautiful floral character, and then passion fruit, and then mango,” Hargrave says. “And then, as you get down to the last half of the beer, this sort of citrusy lime character that I get from a lot of our Mosaic would take over. … It’d be a real journey. It wouldn’t be just citrus, or it wouldn’t be just mango, or it wouldn’t be just strawberry. It’s about that balance. And for me, XPA at its best is that journey.”
XPA as an Education
“It’s going to have a soft aromatic, a soft mouthfeel—that tropical character comes out really quickly,” Hargrave says, in describing an ideal XPA. “It’s going to have a great hoppy mid-palate. … It’s going to have a very even, consistent hop flavor and aroma right across the palate, but it’s going to finish dry and clean and snappy and just leave you wanting another mouthful. And it’s going to leave you with a really nice hop experience without fatiguing your palate at all—which is, I think, quite a balancing act. It’s a beer that has that initial lush, delicious hop character, that manages to [stay] consistent across the palate—there are no dips or hollows in it, and it cleans up nice.”
Achieving that ideal may be easier said than done—but it’s a quest from which any brewer can learn. “I’ve seen lots of people send me what they think XPA is all about and how you do it,” Hargrave says. On one hand, “it’s a lot simpler than you think it is. But in another direction, it’s also more complicated than you think it is.”
At Craft Coast—from the Australian base malts to repitching yeast, from kettle hops to dry hops—the XPA is a beer that’s changed how the brewery makes its other beers. XPA is a beer, Masoner says, “that we can really lean on, and just look at for water-to-grist ratios, pounds-per-barrel of hops, hot-side, cold-side, attenuation—it all has trickled upwards from a small beer into West Coast IPA.”
Chasing a beer that you love can be a great learning experience for any brewer or brewery. Its starts with the raw materials, and then it goes into honing the process and technique.
“That’s where you really start to refine,” Masoner says. “I’m not trying to copy. I’m just trying to close my eyes and envision a beer that I love and drink. … That’s what I love about this business and this industry. You learn, you research, you develop, you talk to the expert.
“And then you create.”