Hi River Rascals! I’ve been meaning to do more of these posts as I unfortunately don’t get to spend as much time out in the taproom talking to people as I’d like, so these are a nice way to talk beer, Riverlands beer specifically. The topic of this round of “The Brewer’s Corner” is the Return to Drinkability. This is a topic that’s been on our mind at Riverlands for quite some time, and it’s begun to inform our approach to almost every beer we make with a few exceptions (looking at you, Imperial Stouts and Pastry Power sour).
Nowhere is this approach more apparent than our lagers. Last time I did a post like this, it was to go into detail about how we’ve revamped our lager program and since then, we’ve gone deep into the lager well. Nothing beats the drinkability of a well-constructed pale lager like a Pilsner or Helles. Using the same love and craftsmanship we poured into those beers to make them complex yet supremely drinkable, we took a hard look at our other great love, our Hazy IPA’s.
This style is really at the heart of our Return to Drinkability initiative. A handful of years ago, the New England Style IPA took the Chicagoland area by storm. The full-bodied smooth mouthfeel, the residual sweetness, the low bitterness and high hop flavors appealed to our senses, and we fully embraced the haze craze. As we’ve done with many other styles, we Chicago area brewers put our own stamp on the style, and our hazies pushed the envelope in body and mouthfeel. This is achieved through many hallmarks of brewing the style, like water chemistry and a high protein malt grain bill, but also through residual sugar. Unfermented sugar leaves a beer with more body, and this can be enhanced with brewing sugars like maltodextrin and lactose. Chicago-area hazy IPA became heavier, fuller, and different than its coastal cousins.
This brings me back to the Return to Drinkability. As our Assistant Brewer, Nick, and I were each drinking a pint of one of our hazy doubles, we both remarked how difficult it was to drink these beers by the pint. Nick had been saying how he had wanted to brew a drier version of one of our hazies, inspired by his love of a particularly well-known West Coast haze maker. I had been hesitant to do so, but upon being tired of our beer’s heaviness while trying to finish a pint, I said let’s do it. Our beer Coastal Daze was born from this idea, but that approach quickly began to influence our other hazies too. Nick trades beer, and I’ve been lucky enough to try beers from across the country that many consider to be the best hazy IPA’s around. I’ve also made my obligatory beer pilgrimage out to New England to try the OGs of the style straight from the source. Aside from the obvious hop saturation and mouthfeel wizardry the best seem to have dialed in, they all shared the quality of being amazingly drinkable even as the ABV increased. Surprised was an understatement when I drank a Triple IPA from one of these breweries and thought it seemed almost refreshing, drinking more like single IPA’s I was seeing back home.
Slowly over the course of the past six months or so, we’ve altered our approach to these beers. We’ve slowly began trying to dry them out, decreasing the level of sweetness and trying not to rely on sugar to create the creamy mouthfeel we all love. In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing some of our returning favorites, as well as some new haze, and all will be brewed with the idea that, even in a double IPA, drinkability is king. You should want to order another pint upon finishing the glass of hop juice in your hand. I get that sugar is delicious. We’re biologically wired to love it, but these were never meant to be decadent beers. A hazy IPA should be a beer you can enjoy while sitting with your friends having a beer or two and not feel like you just had a cheeseburger.
“So, what’s changed?” you may be asking yourself. To start, lower finishing gravity, which means less residual sugar left in the beer. We want a lot of that perceived juiciness to come from the flavor of the expensive hops we used in large quantities, not just sugar levels. When we throw a ton of Citra in a beer, we want that to be what hits you hardest. Next, we simplified some steps in both process and recipe to bring you a lighter colored beer to be a better canvas for those hops to play on, and less to get in the way of wanting to take another sip. We’ve also been carbonating these beers slightly higher to help these flavors dance across your tongue, keeping things bright and lively.
In closing, we want to brew the beer we want to drink, and we want to drink IPA’s that we can have more than one of in a sitting. We’ve always looked for ways to put our own stamp on everything we do, whether its in our recipe our process. We’ve adjusted both here to bring you our take on what we really think these beers should be. With the release of our Anniversary triple IPA, our double IPA Neon River, and our IPA Dean Street all coming this week and next, we hope you all will enjoy the approach we took as much as we have.
Eric Bramwell
Head Brewer/Co-Owner
Riverlands Brewing Company
