Bine Cutter
New England Style IPA
TASTING NOTES
Bright citrus juice and pith, light bread and toast.
ABV: 6.5%
Malt: American Pale 2-Row, Four Star Farms Malted Wheat, Flaked Oats
Hops: Four Star Farms Chaos, Cascade, Crystal, Centennial
Yeast: Omega British Ale
Back in the early days there were a few breweries (mostly in Vermont) pulling off this idea of hazy IPAs and the lines outside their breweries proved the quality of what they were doing.
They had taken the classic IPA style and completely flipped the thinking of the style’s construction.
[ Side note: a traditional IPA is typically brewed with a blend of pale and crystal or caramel malts, hopped generously throughout the boil, and then balanced by emphasizing the caramel characteristics of the crystal malts while pushing high levels of bitterness. These beers tout extreme IBUs and bitterness that could destroy your palette. ]
Back to the story... these new-school brewers created a beer that had the texture of sweetness without the flavor of sweetness, balanced the water in reverse, and then almost exclusively late hopped with super fruity hop varieties. In addition to all that they started dry hopping beers while they were still actively fermenting! And thus the New England IPA was born, beers with more hops than ever but with big, soft, round mouthfeel and incredibly smooth finishes. Massive additions of high protein adjunct grains like flaked oats, flaked wheat, and other body building adjuncts left enormous amounts of protein haze as well as byproducts from the actual digestion of hop compounds by the yeast during fermentation. The result is both ridiculously good and also incredibly hard to do well.
Our version of the NEIPA is simple, straightforward American 2-Row for base fermentable, flaked oats and Four Star Farms grown malted wheat for body and mouthfeel. There are no boil additions of hops, everything is added either post whirlpool or in the dry hops using a blend of Crystal, Centennial, Chaos, and Cascade for a bright citrus flavor and aroma. This beer is double dry hopped meaning that we do a first round of dry hopping while the beer is actively fermenting and follow with a second round at the end of fermentation.