A brief history of IPA
What is IPA? Maybe you’ve heard beer drinkers using the term but didn’t quite know what they were talking about. In this post we will take a look at the interesting story behind the popular IPA beer style.
If you can’t be bothered to read the full history behind the IPA then here is the short TL;DR version of the story. IPA is an acronym that comes from words India Pale Ale and it is the name of a beer style that was originally brewed to survive a long sea voyage to from the UK to India. It is heavily hopped, which gives it quite a bitter taste.
In Shakespearean times the brits weren’t only asking themselves whether to be or not to be, but also considering all the world a stage and all the men and women merely players. Players in a global game where the country that can get the most amount of stuff wins. It’s quite simple really. The Queen points at something and goes “I want it all!” and her men go and get it. One of the things the Queen wanted was spices. Not just some chili in her curry, but also tea. Drinking her afternoon warm water “straight up” was getting old and she figured some dry leaves and dirt might make it more interesting. So, thinking outside the box, she told her men to go get India.
The men sailed over to India, planted a flag, and announced that it belonged to the Queen. East India Company was founded to traffic tea and opium from India to England and supplies in the other direction. One of the more important supplies the brits living in India needed was of course beer. But just any kind of beer wouldn’t do. It had to be brewed in Britain from british hops and british water of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be british (it was also too hot to brew in India). The problem was that ordinary beer went bad on the long sea voyage.
In the ye olden times it took ye olde sweet time to get anywhere. Nowadays it’s a simple thing to get from the UK to India. All we need to do is squeeze into a tin can and eat a bunch of weird salty nuts for a day and that’s it. We complain about this ordeal because the seats don’t go back far enough and the wifi is spotty, but the frustrations of a 17th century traveller were a bit more severe. First of all the trip took a half a score of fortnights to complete. Six mindnumbing months at sea is long enough time for the human body to have replaced most of its cells which means you’re literally a different person once you arrive. The travellers certainly weren’t feeling fresh after the trip so it’s no wonder that the beer wasn’t either.
There was one type of beer that did survive the trip though. It was called October beer and it was intended to be aged in a cellar for two years so six months was nothing. The Allsopp brewery was asked to develop a strongly hopped beer similar to October beer. The result was a beer style that after a bit of fiddling came to be known as India Pale Ale. IPA is strongly hopped, low in sugar and has a paler colour than most other beers at the time.
Although IPA was meant for export it also became popular in England for awhile, but it almost went extinct. Technological advances in shipping and refrigeration made it unnecessary to have such a special purpose beer style. It might have died out if it wasn’t for the Americans who started to bring back forgotten beer styles in the late 70’s. The first of the modern American IPAs was Anchor Liberty Ale.
So there it is. The story of the IPA. Actually this is a very simplified version of the story where, for the sake of storytelling, many a corner was cut and liberty taken. The actual history of the IPA is much more complex and nuanced than it might at first appear, much like the IPAs themselves. Go on, taste one and see for yourself.
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