Modern beer

The IPA lineage is a single argument about hops

English IPA was a well-hopped pale ale for export. American IPA, from around 1980, replaced English hops with American ones and made citrus and pine the point. West Coast IPA pushed bitterness and dryness further and stripped the malt back. Double IPA, from the late 1990s, raised strength to carry more hops still.

Then the direction reversed. Session IPA cut strength while keeping aroma. New England IPA — emerging through the 2000s and named around 2016 — abandoned bitterness almost entirely in favour of enormous late and dry hopping, soft water chemistry, and yeast chosen for fruit expression and haze. A West Coast IPA and a New England IPA are both IPAs and share almost nothing sensorially.

What connects the whole lineage is that each step is an answer to what hops can be made to do. The story is agricultural and chemical rather than stylistic: Cascade in 1972, the Hull breeding programme, the New World varieties of the 2000s, and the understanding of thiol chemistry that explained why some hops smell of tropical fruit and let brewers deliberately design for it.

Haze stopped being a fault

For a century clarity signalled competence, because filtration was the mark of a brewery that could afford it and cheap glass had made beer visible. New England IPA inverted that within a decade: permanent haze, deliberately produced through protein-polyphenol interaction, hop particulate and yeast in suspension, and read by drinkers as a quality signal.

This is a good illustration of how much of what people take for a fact about beer is a convention of a period. The same appearance meant "badly made" in 1990 and "made for me" in 2020, with no change in the liquid.

Sour beer came back from two directions

Belgian spontaneous fermentation never stopped, though it came close — the lambic producers were down to a handful by the 1970s and were rescued substantially by an international audience that valued what the local market had abandoned.

Modern sour brewing mostly does not descend from that. Kettle souring — deliberately acidifying wort with lactobacillus before the boil — is fast, controllable, and technically unrelated to spontaneous fermentation; mixed-fermentation brewing in barrels is closer, but is pitched rather than spontaneous. It is worth not implying a lineage that is not there: the lambic tradition is one thing and the modern sour category is largely another, sharing an acidity and not a method.

Alcohol-free beer finally got good

The change was in the order of operations. Older methods avoided producing alcohol at all — arrested fermentation, maltose-negative yeast, restricted mashes — which meant the beer never developed normal fermentation flavour and tasted sweet and worty. That is why the category had a bad reputation for decades, and the reputation was earned.

Vacuum distillation and membrane separation let a beer ferment fully, developing normal flavour, and then have the alcohol removed. The remaining problem is genuine — alcohol carries aroma and contributes body, so removing it leaves a hole to engineer around — but it starts from real beer. The technology matured through the 2010s into a category people choose rather than settle for.

And the sector was partly bought

The commercial arc of the period is worth stating plainly rather than only celebrating the beer. From around 2011 the large international brewers acquired a substantial number of the best-known craft breweries. Several of the London breweries that defined the modern British revival are now owned by multinationals.

That is neither a scandal nor nothing. It changes what "craft" describes — a word that was never technically defined and is now doing less work than it appears to — and it is a straightforward repeat of the consolidation dynamic of the 1960s, arriving one generation later.