The Swift Rise And Fall Of The Brut IPA

We were ready to write about the best Brut IPA’s for New Year’s and found that a lot that were introduced in 2018 are no longer being produced…

It’s a testament to how ill-defined the style was to begin with, and the reality that in the end consumers didn’t think they were all that special.

The Brut IPA began as a process innovation in a San Francisco brewpub according to October…

 “Kim Sturdavant of Social Kitchen and Brewery took a brewer’s enzyme called amyloglucosidase—an enzyme typically used either for producing light beer or for lightening the body of big, viscous stouts—and added it to the recipe of a typical 7% ABV IPA.

“The process produced something new in itself: An IPA with zero residual sugar, restrained bitterness, lively carbonation and unparalleled drinkability.”

“I had it in my head: What would happen if I used this [enzyme] to make a basically sparkling hop beverage with no sweetness in it?” he told SFGATE in March 2018.

Sturdavant called it the Champagne IPA, then later a Brut IPA, but whatever you call it, the ‘style’ interested brewers and took off. The Brut IPA was quickly anointed the “new, next big thing” and even big craft brewers like New Belgium and Sierra Nevada started producing them.

And craft beer geeks, always drunk on the “new, next big thing” were all about them too…until they weren’t.

If you google Brut IPA all the top articles about style are primarily from 2018, that’s when the style was emerging…almost nothing after that.

Then in May 2019, Cat Wolinski signaled its sudden decline in Is Brut IPA Already Over?…pointing to the beer style’s ill-defined parameters as one of the reasons.

“I like the idea of brut IPA, but there wasn’t enough of a consensus of what they were supposed to be,” Dan Lamonaca, owner of Beer Karma, a beer retail store in Brooklyn, tells VinePair in an email. “The beers I tried were all over the map.”

Some speculate that Brut IPA first took off as a reaction to the whole juicy/hazy/ New England IPA thing, a trend that is still being passionately embraced by consumers and brewers alike, even as interest in the Brut IPA is disappearing…

And maybe passion is what was always missing during the style’s emergence….Brewers and consumers were interested in it, but never passionate about it…at least not enough.

A quick visit to Magruder’s, a Washington DC retailer that sells a wide swath of craft beers, found only one Brut IPA, Victory Fizzy Bizness, on its shelves.

And that was just days away from New Year’s Eve, a time when you’d think there might be increased demand for the champagne-like beer style, if there was any lingering interest at all.

“The Brut IPA style never took off at our store,” Beer manager Joel Glickman told American Craft Beer, “not like those Hazy IPA’s.”