How Pliny the Elder Changed American IPAs
The latest episode of One Iconic Beer is out, and today we turn to Russian River’s Pliny the Elder. I was trying to think about how to make these blog posts more than a glorified link, and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to get the story behind the story. Why did I choose Pliny the Elder, and what story was I hoping to tell?
If you haven’t noticed the pattern, these episodes alternate between foreign and American episodes, and John Holl and I have a list of beers we would like to showcase. A few are really big names almost everyone would have on a list of iconic beers, and Pliny is certainly one of those beers. You’d think these beers would be the easiest to work with, and they are in some ways. Stories attach themselves to established, iconic beers, which makes for good podcasting.
They can also be a little more challenging because their status carries with it an implicit question: what makes these beers special? In these episodes, my goal is to surface the underlying reason(s) a beer has achieved its status.
Pliny the Elder is a tremendous beer, one that developed a cult-like following as the decades have gone by. To me, its story was not principally about how that cult developed, though. Timing, location, and limited distribution all play a role there, and it’s a pretty good story. The more interesting story is how Vinnie Cilurzo made Pliny, and how that affected other breweries.
When Pliny debuted around the turn of the century, IPAs were still largely first-generation beers, made with lots of caramel sweetness and heaviness and massive amounts of bitterness. The “IBU wars” hadn’t really started in earnest yet. (In 2010, Mikkeller released their beer “1000 IBU,” which is when I would date the beginning of the end of that era.) And certainly, bitterness is a big part of Pliny’s DNA. But it was also one of the first beers to give aroma an equal billing, and Vinnie used two dry hop additions to supercharge it.
In another decade, Americans would shift away from bitterness and toward hop flavor and aroma, and in 15 years “DDH” (double-dry hopped) would become a signifier of this change. Vinnie was way ahead of the curve. But it wasn’t just dry-hopping. He also added sugar to thin the body and add crispness to the finish, and he used hop extract in the process. Now that we’re coming back around to West Coast IPAs, they look a whole lot like the template Pliny established a quarter-century ago.
I wanted Vinnie and our other guest, long-time West Coast brewer Mitch Steele, to chart the evolution of American IPAs and identify Pliny the Elder’s influence in the course the style took. Because Pliny has always been only a West Coast beer—mainly just available in California and Oregon—people in the Midwest and East Coast may never have had a chance to taste it, much less understand why it was influential.
So that’s the story you’ll hear today. These guests are both incredibly knowledgeable and well-spoken, and they do a great job describing its influence. Give it a listen!