The Birth of the Juicy
I was thumbing through the latest issue of Craft Beer and Brewing, wherein Randy Mosher has an article on “juicy” IPAs. He begins the article with a brief history of the style, and I was immediately brought up short. A subtle rewriting of American brewing history seems to be underway, and I’m hoping it doesn’t become overly fixed. Hopping beers for flavor and aroma didn’t begin in New England in the late-aughts, and the creeping suggestion it did isn’t accurate. Mosher fixed his story in Vermont, locating the origin story in Greg Noonon’s Vermont Pub and Brewery, where a young John Kimmich was the assistant brewer.
“In search of more aromatic beers, they tolerated the increasing haze, which was then considered deeply inappropriate in an IPA. When Kimmich opened Alchemist in 2003, he had a clear mission: to brew a beer that smelled as much like weed as possible. Eventually a beer called Heady Topper emerged, the first in this radically new mold. This, in turn, inspired Shaun Hill of nearby Hill Farmstead brewery—he became to bestow the “juicy” descriptor.”
First of all, with respect to John Kimmich, he was certainly not the first brewer to be experimenting with aromatics or trying to make his beer taste like weed—not if he was doing it in the late 90s, anyway. I mean, Oregon and California had a ton of hops and a ton of weed, and trying to use the former to make beer taste like the latter goes back at least to the early 1990s on the West Coast. (I know of two brewers who told me of their experiments.)
Trying to make beer more aromatic? That was something West coast breweries were doing from the start. I would love to see Bert Grant’s face if he were presented the theory that it started in the late 1990s. Or Ken Grossman. Or Vinnie Cilurzo. Here in Portland, the first proto-juicy beer—though hardly the first to use hops for aroma—was the murky BridgePort IPA, which had tons of post-kettle hopping and aromatics and blew people away when it was released in 1996. (It also harnessed English yeast to boost the esters and perceived juiciness.) The history of brewing in the Northwest is one of accentuating hop aromatics, and it was underway by the time I became aware of beer in the late 1980s. And while milkshake fluffiness is new, and the use of wheat, oats, and lactose to accentuate them, haze has been a constant in Northwest IPAs just as long. Grossman, in fact, noted this with the release of Hazy Little Thing: "When I started brewing commercially back in 1980, we really had some pretty hazy beers.” That was true of points north all the way to Bellingham.
I’m also curious about the first description of hops as juicy. There’s an old tradition in India wherein texts were given currency by attributing them to a giant—Valmiki, say. It’s sort of like attributing a random painting to Rembrandt; the perceived value is immediately enhanced. In brewing, Shaun Hill isn’t far from Valmiki, so it’s never a bad idea to nod in his direction as a credibility-builder. But Hill Farmstead wasn’t founded until 2010, which would have been the first possible date for Hill to have used it at his brewery.
Maybe that was the first time someone had called aromatic IPAs “juicy.” I was surprised to find that the first time I used here it was January 2012. I was discussing the nature of West Coast IPAs and how people understood them. And in that post, I was already talking about how this was a worldwide phenomenon: “Everyone makes beers like this now--even in Europe. American hops are a worldwide phenom, and citric juiciness pretty much defines American IPAs.” That suggests someone may have used it earlier, but apparently not me.
I can’t imagine that no one used the term juicy before then, since the idea was so widespread. So my question to you, wise hive mind: how early can you date the use of “juicy” to describe hop flavors and aromas?