Pale Ales and IPAs
By Fred Buhl
Tonight's topic is Pale Ales. These beers, being particular favorites of your humble narrator, were a semi-obvious choice for discussion. However, I'm sure as I write this sucker up that I am bound to discover more about Pale Ales than I know now, though perhaps want or need to know.
Most of this I will shamelessly swipe from Michael Jackson (the brewgod, not the alleged pederast; well, he could be an alleged pederast too, I suppose. Heck they were slamming Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur C. Clarke for chrissakes, on some thing in Sri Lanka; the whole thing was specious as all hell, but hey, the guy who wrote 2001, please? But I digress). The Brewing Techniques website also has some interesting historical info on IPAs, which I regurgitate here (the stories, not the IPAs, hopefully).
The origins of many beer styles are shrouded in mystery. The origins of Pale Ales are, in fact, not particularly shrouded in mystery, which, sadly, means I actually had research to do. The term, and presumably the style, dates back to at least the 1700s, and became quite popular in the mid-1800s.
Pale Ales are, unsurprisingly, on the paler end of the color spectrum, as compared to say porters and stouts. Not as pale as pilsners or american pissbiers, but the guys naming the style had never heard of either. Even with the light malt grain-bill, they were amber & copper colored, and not golden, though, in part due to the fact they were boiled in copper kettles, which acts as a catalyst for browning, or melatonization, if you're studying for the BJCP.
You can't talk about Pale Ales without mentioning Burton-on-Trent, which is not the a title of british gay porn novel (as I previously thought) but rather the name of a town on the Trent river in the no-doubt-lovely English midlands (not far from Birmingham-no, not that Birmingham, obviously). The abbey monks of Burton were brewing as early as the 1200s, and no doubt a few century head start on some of their competitors led to an improved product, but it is Burton's well water (not Trent river-water), drawn from deep wells (over 1000 ft), with the water's high concentrations of gypsum and calcium sulfate, that gives the beers produced there a distinctive flavor. The are "Burton Salts" commercially available for adding to one's brewing-water to better approximate this character; even some brewers in Burton (with shallower wells, worried about fertilizer contamination), filter their water and add these salts back in (shame, SHAME!).
Burton also created a unique fermentation style, the Burton Union system, where overflows from fermenting casks are collected in a trough and fed back into the casks, all the time observed by striking British brewery workers, who don't lift a finger (hence the name, Union system). This method leaves a lot of the yeast behind in the trough, and helps clarify the beer (important for unfiltered beer served on cask, thanks to CAMRA); it's also had an effect on the yeast strains used in these breweries (they're a bit powdery, apparently). Of course, it's a colossal pain in the ass to maintain something like this, and only the Marston Brewery in Burton still does things this way-for their Pedigree Pale Ale, 40% of the Ale passes through this union system, though even that starts out in open squares for the first two days.
Interestingly enough, the large, 4-barrel casks used there are wooden, now from German forests (originally Lithuanian wood was used). Pale Ales were tradionally brewed in wood, as was everything else back then, I suppose.
A particular subset of the Pale Ale style, India Pale Ale, was designed to stand up well to shipping to places like, well, India. This style is credited to George Hodgeson, a brewer at the Bow brewery in East London in the 1790's. IPAs of that era featured high gravities (in the 1070s) and incredible, Dr. Bob-levels of hoppiness: 4-5 pounds per barrel, with a pound or two for dry-hopping (yes, they really thought they needed the dry hopping, I guess to bring out the flavor a bit). Of course, hops were different back then, yada yada yada, but still pretty amazingly hoppy, one has to think. Sadly, the beers of this era have long eroded their casks and bottles, and are now eating way down to the earth's core, where they are expected to produce a distinct note of Fuggles in the world's volcano emissions. The hops were used to balance the malt (yeah, right) but also as a preservative. The beer was carried in wooden casks, and the length of the trip did impart a wooden-cask flavor to the beer, although how it could be detected under all that hoppage is a mystery to me. After Hodgson's success the Burtonites copied the style, and with their superior water, improved on it.
Ballantine, a Scottish emigree to the US, brought IPAs to America, wooden casks and all. The current revival of the style has been credited to Bert Grant, who shocked the aforementioned Mr. Jackson with his incredibly hoppy IPA, which we will be tasting tonight. Many, many other American breweries now brew Pale Ale -good people doing good works-typically using the typical American hops (Cascade, especially), instead of the traditional Fuggles & East Kent Goldings. Many use oak chips after fermentation to impart that cask character; I'm ashamed to admit I've never bothered to do that with my FrogHead Pale Ale (which sadly we will not be tasting tonight), but I think I will start.
I've heard various arguments about Bitters vs. Pale Ales. Mr. Jackson hisself says that the two terms overlap; the BJCP has Bitters and English Pale Ales as subcategories of the same style, with the American Pale Ales and India Pale Ales in styles all by themselves. For those of us aspiring to be judges, it's important to know the BJCP's definitions, but in the mother country of both styles, things aren't quite so distinct, and it should be remembered that they were brewing these beers for a couple of centuries prior to the BJCP. That being said, Pale Ales tend to be less dry than Bitters, and Bitters are usually served draft while pale ales bottled (all this widget and draft-beer-in-the-can stuff has muddied the waters considerably). Jackson says that in breweries that make beers of both types, the pales are their "premium" ales - slightly higher in gravity, and less hoppy, than the bitters, and with more nutty malt character. It should also be noted that the IPA style name is being misapplied to some beers, like Bass, where it says I.P.A right on the label. Clearly, this is not the 4lbs hops/barrel stuff the Brits were tossing down while they were busily being all Imperial and keeping the wogs in line down there, for their own good, of course, but then isn't that the arrogance of all western states, well content to impose their myopic worldview on any nation unwilling to be their obedient little client state, unwilling to play its divinely appointed to to feed the Mammon that is our self-destructive consumerist culture, which will soon implode in a halo of credit-card debt and reality television...but I digress again.
Regardless, if Franklin really said that "Beer is Proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy", then he might also approve of Houseman's words:
Say, for what were the hopyards meant,
or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
to justify God's ways to man.