pFriem Builds a West Coast IPA From the Ground UP
“West Coast IPA is not new,” Josh Pfriem announced, as we began discussing his brewery’s latest year-round offering. Josh grew up in Seattle and started brewing almost twenty years ago, so he’s seen this style develop. But what started out as a gentle evolution, from heavy, sweet bitter bombs of the turn of the century to increasingly aromatic IPAs of the teens, encountered an unexpected disruption.
“When the haze craze hit, in 2015-’17, people started thinking about the reaction to hazy IPA. You take a beer like Boneyard RPM, a beer that was never meant to be ‘hazy,’ but always had haze in it. It’s not a hazy IPA from the east coast, but it was very juicy, rounded and soft.” Indeed, there never was a single “West Coast IPA”—there was a continuum from the dry, bitter, and clear IPAs in Southern California to those softer versions in the Northwest. pFriem’s flagship IPA (in the black can) is very much a creature of the organic process that was unfolding prior to the hazy disruption.
In the aftermath, “it made people more intentional about wanting clear IPA or hazy IPA,” he said. When they sat down to create a distinct West Coast IPA (debuting in a red can), “it allowed us to identify what ‘clear’ IPA is now.” West Coast IPAs have encountered a moment of rebooting, and pFriem used it as an opportunity to interrogate the style.
Lean But Not So Mean
In part one of this series, I discussed what consumers think when they hear the words “West Coast IPA.” My question to Josh was: where did pFriem land on this question?
“It’s moving, but what I’m gathering about where WC IPA is at the moment: it’s bright; it’s mostly a pale-malt base. It’s not nearly as bitter as it used to be. It’s brighter than it used to be. It’s probably got some sugar, some dextrose, to lighten the body and make the hops have even more impact (which is an old WC IPA technique. The hops jump out of the glass and the flavor is super impactful.”
In this post-hazy world, many Northwest brewers are looking south for clues about this, and when I spoke to Green Cheek brewer Evan Price, he emphasized their balance and drinkability. “I’m personally after this West Coast IPA that’s dry, and it’s light-bodied and the bitterness is just sitting right there in just the right way so it’s drying out the palate so it’s letting you know it’s there.”
This is the approach pFriem took. “We found that a pretty simple body of our Rahr two-row pale base with some dextrose in the kettle makes a really nice canvas for these beers,” Josh said. “They’re very bright and they lean toward the drier side.” In the days before hazy IPA’s arrival, brewers had been dialing back sweetening caramel malt everywhere, including the Northwest, and Josh feels like the once-mandatory malt is now a liability. “I think if you’re going to put caramel malt in it and call it a WC IPA, that’s a mistake.” These beers finish very dryly by historic standards, and pFriem’s bottoms out a bit below two degrees Plato. (By comparison, hazy IPAs finish at four or above).
I’ve written fairly often how hazy and West Coast IPAs have started moving toward each other—hazies drying out and finding balance in a bit of bitterness, WC IPAs embracing the juice. If there’s a philosophical difference that marks the two camps as distinct right now, however, it may have to do with the yeast. With hazies, the goal is boosting the fruit-juiciness by any means, whereas with West Coast IPAs, it’s stripping everything back except the hops. Green Cheek, for example, not only uses the neutral Chico strain, but ferments in the low 60s to suppress esters.
pFriem chose an American ale yeast that produces very clean ferments with restrained esters—and some acidity. “We really like that acidity. It’s going to be on the lower pH side than we’ve done historically with hoppy beers. It’s not loud, but it’s there.” Increasing the acidity should frame the fruitiness present in the hops themselves.
Of course, all of this is mere preparation for the main main act: hops.
An IPA Without the Hops?
The biggest change since 2015 isn’t actually a question of appearance. It’s the way everyone makes IPAs, whether they’re called hazy, West Coast, cold, or anything else. In those eight years, an entire industry has grown up around the goal of injecting more hop flavor and aroma into sixteen ounces of beer. Hop products have been around longer than craft brewing, but in the mid-teens the focus shifted. Formerly they were designed for industrial production, to more easily bitter a beer or offer bitterness without skunking compounds. But then came cryo. Responding to breweries’ need to reduce liquid absorbing hop mass, hop companies began separating out the lupulin content from the leaf matter, which now appear in many products, from enriched pelletized hops to liquids and concentrates. A whole series of innovations followed—including some that trigger biochemical changes—that promise to deliver ever more concentrated flavors to IPAs.
Most people who follow beer closely are aware of these changes. But Josh startled me when he offered this statement: “I’ve heard people say, ‘There might be a point in the future when these beers don’t have any actual hop material in them.”
!
Of course, that’s the natural endpoint of this trend, but my mind had never dared go there—and pFriem isn’t there yet, either. For this version of West Coast IPA, the brewery used Citra and Strata, along with one of those advanced products, Strata CGX. “Citra gives a really soft, ripe, tropical tangerine note in the background. Strata gives you strawberry and ganja—like sweet cannabis flavor—maybe pepper.” Most of the load comes in the form of conventional hops, but that may change. “The beer is going to be a sandbox,” Josh said, “and a moving beer.”
We discussed terpenes, thiols and thiolized yeast, and other products, which interest the brewers at pFriem. “Ten years ago a craft brewer wouldn’t touch [these] with a ten-foot pole, but now are widely accepted and being used. I think that’s the future of West Coast IPAs.” An inquiry into the use, misuse, and disuse of those various products forms the subject of the third post in this series. But the reality is that the use of hop products, broadly defined, is now a given in making modern IPAs.
pFriem’s DNA follows Josh’s instinct to refinement. The brewery spent years dialing in its helles before it got a release earlier this year as a year-round product. It will therefore be fun to see how a “sandbox” beer develops. I am personally curious to see if pFriem will offer one of those no-actual-hops IPAs. If they do, we might find it in a red can.