Beer Geek’s Guide to NEIPA: The Top 20 Best NEIPAs Worldwide

New England style IPA has become one of the hot and trendy styles of the beer world in the last few years. To celebrate NEIPAs success we’ve collected together the statistics of the best NEIPAs worldwide.

NEIPAs have found their way also to the selection of bigger breweries. The style has become quite popular in a very short time. About ten years ago there were only a few Vermont IPAs on the market.

As the name stands, NEIPA is a second episode for IPA, the historical UK-based beer style, which is known for a rich but bitter and mostly dry hop aroma. The barrels were filled with hops as a preservative to keep the beer during long sails. That’s how IPA was invented.

NEIPA instead comes from the other side of the Atlantic, more accurately from Vermont, where it was brewed for the first time in 2011.

The first NEIPA is said to be Heady Topper, brewed by The Alchemist, whose brewer decided to make an unfiltered and unpasteurized IPA. The result was thicker and fuller, a murky beer with rich fruity and hoppy aroma. An NEIPA.

Haziness or cloudiness is one of the main criteria that make an NEIPA. That’s why they’re also called hazy IPAs. Sometimes the line between an IPA and an NEIPA can be unstable, but finally the haziness and taste will tell what there is in your glass. 

The taste characteristics of NEIPA are quite recognizable. If an IPA is usually more bitter, in an NEIPA the aroma hops are highlighted, bringing fruity and fresh taste without dryness or bitterness.

NEIPA has a rich taste that reminds of tropical fruits, such as pineapple, passionfruit, guava, mango and citruses but in a fresh way, not bitter.

NEIPA is said to be quite easy to brew, because you can hide the possible weak spots with a rich hoppiness. Normally brewers use dry hopping to bring out the best and freshest characters from the hops.

Hops are obviously highlighted in the brewing process because they are in charge of the inviting aromas. But there wouldn’t be a respectable NEIPA without a decent body. And that’s what the malts are in charge of.

Also the fermentation is a critical stage. If the fermentation isn’t fiery enough, the beer will miss out the essential yeast esters.

Cloudiness, mouthfeel and foam can all be worked with malts. Oats and wheat are often used besides barley. Taste and mouthfeel can also be added with different kinds of additives. For example lactose is typically used for milkshake IPAs, but sometimes it also brings special characters to NEIPA.

To recognize a NEIPA shouldn’t be difficult nowadays, but sometimes the liquid poured over doesn’t really remind the hoped for product. Mistakes can always happen. NEIPA is a style that’s easily exposed to off-tastes, such as oxidation.

But maybe even more often an NEIPA reminds more of an IPA.  So perhaps the rule should be that every NEIPA is also an IPA, but not every IPA is an NEIPA.

The Best-Rated NEIPAs

Since 2011 brewing of NEIPAs has spread to Europe and nowadays even the best-rated NEIPAs come from the continent, at least according to Pint Please statistics.

If you’re already familiar with earlier announced stats of the best British and French beers, there will not be huge surprises this time. The list of the top 20 NEIPAs is quite full of British Verdant Brewing Company’s (double) NEIPAs (4) and French The Piggy Brewing Company’s (triple) neipas (9).

The first place goes to Fruit Car Sight Exhibition and second to Putty, which have both been valued as the best beers worldwide in 2021. At the latest, this speaks of the huge popularity and respect for NEIPAs.

In the third place there’s Lacrima de Oro, brewed by The Piggy Brewing. This 10-procent triple NEIPA is an excellent example of a ripe fruity NEIPA with rich passionfruit and papaya aromas and slight sweetness.

The surprise may be that there are even three different Finnish beers on the list, best one of them climbing even to the eighth place. But this is totally understandable since Pint Please app is widely used in Finland.

The best-rated beers tend to be strong. That’s why tere are mostly double and triple NEIPAs on the list. The mildest one, on the sixth place, has 6,5 percent alcohol.

The stats are based on Pint Please reviews. Only beers with more than 50 reviews are taken into account.