You May Ask Yourself, "Well, How Did I Get Here?"

I’m going to tell you right here at the outset that I don’t know where this is going. I do know where it started: I was sitting down for an episode of the new season of Great British Bake-Off, and I poured out a can of Pure Project’s Fresh West. Maybe once a year, Pure Project sends me a dispatch of beer. It’s a great brewery, and they hosted me for a book tour stop back in 2021, so it’s a lovely treat to find on my doorstep.

Perhaps because of the recent Rogue news, I was especially alive to the experience of drinking that beer. Even as the scent reached my nostrils, I was struck by its almost luminous modernity. The scent was intense in the way some candy is when you tear open the package—sweet with fruitiness but also sharp in its sheer magnitude. The brewery describes it as “grapefruit, pine, and apricot [aromas] and bold flavors of resin, grapefruit rind, and lemon,” and those are accurate as far as they go. But they also seem inadequate to the task of conveying the radical way hops present themselves when compared to early eras of brewing. Fresh West is made with Simcoe and Citra Fresh Frozen Cryo hops layered on top of their flagship West Coast IPA recipe, which produces flavors and aromas that just weren’t possible—what, five years ago? (In case it’s not clear—the beer is fantastic. I handed the glass to Sally, who finds only about 15% of IPAs palatable, and she said, “Oh! That’s nice!”)

The thought occurred to me: what would a drinker have made of this beer twenty or thirty years ago?

I think most people would enjoy this beer today, leaving aside those who hate hops. (I am a little humble about predicting mass tastes because I have been wrong about them so often). I’m not sure they’d have loved it in 1995. Fresh West has almost no body. Its fermentation profile is lager-clean. There’s very little bitterness. The scents and flavors form an insubstantial cloud that evaporates the moment you swallow, like cotton candy. When used in mass, hops contribute a grippy texture, a stiffness. Thanks to modern hop products, IPAs can now be perfectly smooth and textureless.

I have a habit of mind that goes like this: all cuisine and beverages evolve, which means that at any given time we’re in a more perfect place than before. If only we could give those pour souls in 1975 a cup of Coava coffee, or in this example a Fresh west to 1995 drinkers, it would change their lives. But that’s not how things work. Beer has evolved partly because we have evolved along with it. All you have to do is look at different beer regions to see that the process of evolution can lead to very different places. It’s quite possible that for 1995 Jeff, the clouds wouldn’t have parted upon drinking a can of Fresh West.

I might have found it off-putting in any number of ways. I liked bitterness then, and body, and just a bit of cheese grater that came from the bitterness/hop-matter synergy. It was like being slapped across the face, but with the flavor of caramel malt, and I liked it. I might have thought Fresh West was a cop-out beer, all candy aromas and no punch, not like a proper beer. I’m not sure there will be a 2055 Jeff or that he’ll be drinking beer (I’ll be 87), but I wonder what he’ll be drinking? It might be something I’d find distasteful today. Hmmm…

Okay, with that I’m off to rake leaves.