XPA, WC Pils, Hoppy Lager—Call Them What You Want, I Calls ‘Em Tasty
Sally and I were sitting in front of the Colombia-Ghana game at the bar at Level Beer (Sandy Blvd outpost). After a cool and wet week, the sun had returned and I had started my evening with a Sweep the Leg—a rice lager appropriate for the weather and mole enchiladas. For my second round, I chastely ordered a ten-ounce pour of Top Secret XPA. That turned out to be a strategic mistake, as it was awesome, and I ended up ordering a second ten-ounce pour.
A weekend earlier, the two of us were sitting on the deck of Thunder Island in Cascade Locks, and I ordered Thunder Buddy, the first beer from their new brewer’s tenure (Brendan? Justin?), and also a banger. That one was labeled a hoppy lager, and featured a trio of Indie Hops strains (Strata, Audacia, and Meridian) for extra Oregonness.
These beers called to mind two of the Oregon Homegrown beers I enjoyed recently—Breakside’s “contemporary American lager”—and Von Ebert’s XPA. And indeed, we could throw in a third, which was pretty darn close to these, Sunriver’s “classic pale ale,” which was nothing of the kind. (It was lean, juicy, and crisp). I keep stumbling on these wonderful little beers, usually around 5%, that drink like lagers but smell and taste like hoppy ales. And everyone calls them something different.
Had you handed me unlabeled glasses of these beers and asked me to identify the style, I probably would have said West Coast pilsner. They all fit into the same box: they looked like pilsners in the glass, but sported lush, tropical aromatics. The flavor profile followed the nose, with lovely juicy flavors (as with IPAs, the specific character depended on the hops) that were present without being overly intense. Or anyway, not by today’s standards. All were lean, with finishing gravities I would place below 2.5 Plato, and some below 2, and all finished with a lager-like snap. Whether they used lager yeasts is somewhat beside the point for the consumer, but they drank like lagers.
Brewers identify these things with at least six different style names, and I get why. Most of these beers are in their experimental draft-only stage of development. You’ve got eight to twelve handles, and you want to have a variety to choose from. Depending on how the brewer conceived of the beer, they might choose ale or lager, and depending on which customer they are targeting, might call the beer a pale ale or a pilsner. Since no one has settled on what to call these, it’s a pick ‘em for the brewing staff.
This is why I didn’t go into graphic design.
I have no doubt that some brewers and style prescriptivists would argue that there are differences among these “styles.” Perhaps, as the years roll by, we will begin to see material distinctions among them as well—more malt in the pale ales, more bitterness in the pilsners, something like that. But as they currently exist, I’m finding they constitute a tighter “style” than a lot of American beers, particularly IPAs.
This seems like a significant development. I saw a similar thing happening in the early to mid aughts, when breweries were reformulating IPAs to accentuate aroma and flavor rather than bitterness. When everything shook out, we ended up with IPAs that were incredibly aromatic and flavor-forward, and quite a bit less bitter than they were a decade earlier. We continue to call them different things (hazy IPA, American IPA, WC IPA, cold IPA, etc), but they all fit into a profile customers recognize. It was an industry-wide change fueled both by new discoveries in hop breeding and brewing techniques, but also those customer demands.
These new whatever-they-ares seem to be following the same pattern. Brewers throw a lot at the wall, and most of it doesn’t stick. These are just tremendous beers, though, and seem perfectly timed for this moment. From the brewers’ perspective, I think they’re a no-brainer to make. They combine elements of beers they already make every day, so they can whip them up without breaking a sweat. Consequently, the batting average for good examples is much higher than it was when brewers try beers with novel methods or materials.
Moreover, they aren’t just being pushed by breweries—there’s customer pull as well. As we were watching that World Cup game at Level, Sally tried my XPA, and her eyes grew wide. She isn’t averse to modern American hoppy styles, but most of them go too far in one direction or another for her. I’ve been noticing that she hasn’t reacted that way to these beers. They just have a more approachable balance point, and she really likes the way the hops express themselves. At the risk of making a second prediction that will no doubt blow up in my face, I think this trend has legs.
It just needs a name we can all agree on.