A Different Approach to IPA - Part 1

We here at KBC love hoppy IPAs just as much as the next brewery. Perhaps we are not alone, though, in feeling that sometimes it is hard to keep up with the pace at which the style changes and new hops hit the market. West Coast, New England, Mid-coast, Hazy, Session, Double, Imperial, Belgian, Specialty...Citra, Mosaic, HBC 344, Akoya, Zappa, Lotus, Medusa...whirlpool, hopgun, dry hop, mash hop...it can get quite easy to find oneself lost in the haze!

All of this got us thinking: do our customers even know what they are getting when they read through the hype to choose an IPA to drink? This inspired the concept for this beer — to clear up some of the murkiness surrounding dry hopping, specifically dry hopped beers versus double dry hopped beers.

Quite simply, dry hopping is the addition of hops to nearly complete beer. The addition usually happens at fermentation temperature or lower, which means more of the aroma component can remain in the finished product. Dry hopping once would be single dry hopping, where double would be twice, triple would be three times, and so on.

But how much difference does this make in the final product? Is more necessarily better? Are there compromises that must be made through continually increasing the number of times one dry hops? Those are some of the dilemmas we sought to answer not by talking about it, but by putting the results side by side for you to examine for yourself.

More details about the beer to follow, but the concept is simple: we take the same beer, split it between two tanks, and dry hop them. One tank gets a single dry hop, the other a double dry hop. Everything else stays the same, including the ratio and variety of hops being used. We hope you are as excited as we are to try what is certainly our most educational brew to date! If all goes according to plan, this beer will be ready for release the week of August 3.