A good Brut IPA is a curious thing. It bursts with the hop aromatics of a heavy IPA but beneath those brash flavors is a delicate, almost dainty body. It drinks like a glass of dry champagne.
Brut IPAs have spread across the country since their invention in San Francisco last year. Brewers make these beers with aromatic American hops and a special enzyme, which helps break down the remaining sugars in a beer leaving a clean, dry, and light body. I’ve been skeptical of the trend—could you really deliver hop flavor in a beer that feels more like champagne than an IPA?—until I tried Hellbent Brewing’s Hella Lazy Brut IPA last week.
At first Hellbent’s brut seemed like any normal modern, fruit-forward IPA. It had a fragrant aroma of mangoes and ripe fruit, and as soon as I took a sip my mouth was filled with the flavor of dried mangoes and hops. But then, a trick. After the first burst of ripe hop flavor the body totally falls off and you are left with a thin and refreshingly light body.
For someone that frequently drinks IPAs, drinking Hellbent’s brut was a surprise, like that feeling in your gut during the sudden drop of a rollercoaster. It was an illusion, it was fun.
I wasn’t the only person enamored by this beer, which was a collaboration with Lazy Boy Brewing. Hellbent’s bartender referred to the beer as “the only thing I care about in life right now” and my drinking partner, who showed up later in the evening and tried a brut IPA with no introduction to the style exclaimed “it’s so light!” as soon as she drank her first sip.
It’s usually hard to pin down the exact starting point for a beer style, ask two beer historians where the first porter was made and you’re likely to start a heated argument, but brut IPA has a very clear origin story. Kim Sturdavant, the head brewer at San Francisco’s Social Kitchen and Brewery, created the style when he used an enzyme (called Amyloglucosidase) usually reserved for making high alcohol beers on a lighter IPA.
“I just thought it would be really rad to [use Amyloglucosidase] for an everyday drinking beer, just a bone-dry IPA,” Sturdavant told me a couple months ago. “And that kind of blossomed into what can I do to make this champagne-like and how could I make tropical, sparkling, fruity aromas in a glass of beer?”
The Amyloglucosidase breaks down all of the sugar in the beer, leaving no residual sugar in the final product. Sturdavant borrowed the wine term “brut,” which in the world of wine refers to dry, or low-sugar wines, because of this dry nature of this new IPA style. This new style is sometimes referred to as “Champagne IPAs” but brewers should stop doing that. These beers have nothing to do with either the Champagne region of France or Method de Champenoise or the specific way the French sparkling wine is made.
Sturdavant has a few broad rules for the style: the beer needs to have strong American hop aromas, it must be dry with as close to zero remaining sugar as possible, the body of the beer must be as pale as possible, and the carbonation level should be strong. Basically, it should replicate a dry champagne but with American hop aromas.
Sturdavant’s style quickly took off, first spreading around San Francisco within just a few months, and now it’s made in breweries across the world.
“More and more people in the Bay Area started making them. Then I started getting emails from people in Australia, New England, Brazil, and all over the U.S.,” Sturdavant said.
And now the brut IPA has finally arrived in Seattle. Not all breweries are able to execute this brand new style, I’ve tried two other brut IPAs and neither were enjoyable or unique. But when it’s done right, brut IPA delivers an unexpected and tasty drinking experience.
