For ages, professional brewers have gone to great lengths to produce the clearest of beers, no doubt appealing to appearance conscious consumers. Similarly, homebrewers desiring a product of seemingly equal quality invest quite a bit of effort in clarifying their beer– collecting the clearest wort from the mash, fining with Irish moss or Whirlfloc in the boil, cold crashing, hitting the fermented beer with a post-fermentation fining agent such as gelatin or Clarity Ferm. A beer’s clarity is viewed by many as the first sign of quality.

But this isn’t universally true, at least not among a growing subset of trend-bucking, clear beer scoffing brewers who have begun producing hazy beer intentionally, some to the point of appearing downright murky. And people are eating it up! Over the last few years, the increased popularity of opaque, “juicy,” so called New England/Northeast style IPA has led to some controversy in the brewing and beer world with one vocal contingent claiming the haze contributes to a character all its own while another equally as loud group questions such claims. Conversations between folks on either side of clarity line often devolve into accusations of close-mindedness, poor brewing skills, and occasionally cynical suggestions of regional breweries just trying to make a name for themselves.

For today’s Brü’s Views, I asked the contributors to share their honest opinions on the clear/hazy beer controversy. I reached out to multiple brewers of popular hazy IPA seeking contributions, my intention being to allow them the opportunity to clarify (no pun intended) their perspective and approach. For the first time since starting this series, I didn’t receive a single response from any of the four breweries I initially contacted. It’s totally likely they were too busy or my email got sent to a spam folder or, I don’t know, they don’t like typing…

Thankfully, my buddy and juicy beer advocate, Ed Coffey, hooked me up with a friend of his who produces a few examples of hazy New England IPA professionally and who also happens to be a fan of Brülosophy. A huge thanks to John Wible from Philadelphia’s 2nd Story Brewing Company for sharing his views on hazy beer!

On The Hazy Beer Controversy

| JOHN WIBLE |

Some people (West Coasters, I’m looking at you) think hazy beers are the result of a flawed brewing process. Sure, we’ve all run into a few hazy beers that have been brewed improperly. I’d personally call those murky, not hazy. I’m not advocating for those beers. But properly brewed, hop-forward beers need not be filtered or fined to remove residual protein/hop haze.

Filtered or fined beers have become the norm on the West Coast particularly. But this status quo is limiting the perspective on IPAs that present as hazy; many such beers are coming out of the Northeast region of the U.S. right now. There are several well known breweries in the area that are brewing with precision, proper technique and handling, and those beers are hazy. These IPAs are of equal quality as the brite West Coast beers. It would be a travesty to ignore these hazy beers simply because they are not the historical “norm”. The reality is these styles historically wouldn’t have been brite. It’s a testament to how far we have progressed with brewing science that clarity is achievable even when there are brewing or fermentation flaws. But we should aim for flawless brewing and fermentation, whether it results in a brite beer or a hazy beer.

It’s not just a simple matter of preference though, hazy or brite. The protein/hop haze of a beer can add a certain texture to the experience. The mouthfeel of a dry-hopped beer is certainly different than the same beer when fined/filtered. That texture is desirable in my opinion. I’m not talking about murky beers where there’s visible material floating around the glass, or where fermentation wasn’t allowed to fully complete. What I’m describing is well-brewed beer that has a lasting haze as a desired result or byproduct of the process. These hazy beers have substance behind them. A lasting protein haze, at least in my case, has to do with using adjuncts like flaked varieties of oats and wheat. The mouthfeel and overall malt profile gain is worth the haze. I very much appreciate the huskiness that oats lend to a beer without adding sweetness or color.

The filtering/fining process is part of the recipe of beer. Some beers are best clarified, but others should not be. Whether to filter or fine is as crucial to the recipe of a beer as something as important as mash temp. Perception is everything and we, of course, taste with the visual appearance of a beer first. Some brewers are opting to make every IPA crisp, almost abrupt, by filtering/fining. I’d argue they’re limiting the potential of some of these beers. I’ve made versions of the same Double IPA, with and without fining. The unfined version looks more appealing, more substantial. It’s a beer you can dig into. That IPA would not be what I intended it to be if I clarified it. It was conceived as a hazy beer and thus remains so.

What do consumers think of the haze? Well, some might be used to or simply expect the brite beers they see around. But if they’re interested in tasting the fullness of a beer, they might need to trust us brewers a bit. I’ll make a brite beer when it’s supposed to be brite. But let them embrace the haze of a dry hopped IPA with me. If we allow our beers to represent a spectrum of taste, texture, and haziness, we’ll all be drinking a lot more good beer together.

Bottom line: Don’t assume a hazy beer is the result of bad brewing. I don’t want the intentionality of my hazy beer to be misconstrued as poorly brewed beer. It’s hazy, not murky. And it’s supposed to be that way.

| GREG |

I’ll admit that I, like I imagine most people, have an innate bias for the beauty of clear beer. Like the saying goes, we drink with our eyes first, and few would likely disagree that clear beer is far more visually pleasing. There is always going to be a tinge of pride that comes from handing a friend a homebrewed beer that is every bit as sparkling clear and inviting as commercial offerings.

When it really comes down to what I want to drink, though, I don’t particularly care about clarity. Hand me a beer, any beer, crystal clear or cloudy as mud, as soon as it hits my lips, I try to only be concerned with the one thing that matters- taste. Is the beer visually pleasing? My mouth doesn’t have eyes. Is it to style? If it’s not a BJCP competition, who cares. Is it highly ranked on BeerAdvocate? Doesn’t matter. All I care about in that moment is the symphony of flavors blanketing my taste buds. Impossible as it may be to overcome one’s own biases, I try my best to ignore all preconceived notions and attempt to experience the beer as it is. Clarity simply doesn’t matter.

Recently, there has emerged a small but growing contingent espousing the virtues of cloudy beer, namely the Northeastern IPA. I’d love to pass judgement on this style, good or bad, but I’m a West Coaster with little access to these delicious sounding concoctions. The vast majority of beer I consume you could read a book through, and the remaining is mostly jet black. As a hop lover, I’m quite curious about this infamous new style since so many hail it as the next big thing in beer, but really, is cloudiness the defining characteristic that makes it so special? Could the same flavor profile and silky mouthfeel not be achieved in a way that also maintains perfect clarity? I’ve waited far too long to start experimenting with Northeastern IPA, an oversight I look forward to correcting immediately.

| MARSHALL |

I live by a simple philosophy, it may seem disingenuous to some, but it has afforded me a rather pleasant existence. Basically, I don’t allow my personal perspectives to influence my expectations of others. I acknowledge that a particular belief or opinion is not inherently true or better merely because I am its holder. This mentality allows me to accept those I staunchly disagree with on all kinds of stuff, big or small, to a degree even my wife sometimes finds annoying. I do my best to speak and think equivocally, allowing myself the opportunity to change my mind in light of adequate evidence while expecting no such reciprocation from others. This doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions. I do, strong ones, even when I’m not trying to convince people I’m right.

Even on things as trivial as beer clarity.

I truly couldn’t care less what another person chooses to drink and would never deride someone because they prefer something different than me, seriously at least. Personally, I like my beer clear, and the fact xBmts on the matter have thus far shown fined/clear beer to be largely indistinguishable from hazy versions only buttresses this opinion. I will change my mind without hesitation when a panel of blind tasters are capable of distinguishing a hazy beer from a clear version of the same recipe. In fact, I will even stop fining my own beers if, when tasted blindly, I am able to reliably select the unique sample, I prefer the hazy one… and it doesn’t result in me taking multiple trips to the loo the following morning.

I adhere rather strongly to the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I’m still waiting for the evidence demonstrating haze as adding something substantial to beer. Thus far, the huge majority of the support I’ve seen for hazy IPA comes from anecdotal reports, people claiming they perceive a qualitative difference. If there’s anything about this whole thing that makes me scratch my head, it’s this. While I think it’s pretty dickish to accuse people of being bad brewers because of the way their beer looks, particularly when said beer is selling like crazy, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something more at play. It makes sense to me, for example, that brewers from a particular region looking to stand out might do something like popularize hazy beer as a mostly playful snub to other regions, and that drinkers from that region would latch on the same way we do local sports teams. I’m cool with that.

To be fair, I have only tried a couple commercial examples of intentionally hazy beer, Heady Topper being one of them (a few times). I liked them all just fine, but I was curious how my experience might have been different had the beer fit my arguably vain perspective of what a good beer should look like.

| RAY |

I’m vain. I’ll admit it, especially when it comes to beer, I want it to look pretty.

Admittedly, I never gave much thought to beer clarity before I was a brewer. Most beers were clear, though some were not, and that was okay. Occasionally, I would have a bottle conditioned beer and learned I could pour it clearly if I did so carefully, but agitation would cause the beer to be cloudy. And it would taste different, the yeast after all has a flavor of its own, and I preferred the clear pours.

When I began homebrewing and bottle conditioning, I continued this practice, as most probably did, but soon learned some beers would remain cloudy despite having a nice compact yeast cake on the bottom of a bottle. What gives? Eventually, I learned not all yeast drops at the same time, and of something called chill haze. I took to leaving bottles a week or two in the fridge before opening them to eliminate most of this haze since I’ve always preferred beer that is clear. I like looking at it, I perceive it differently (undoubtedly due to bias), and find it cleaner and more enjoyable to drink.

When I started kegging, gelatin fining replaced time as my weapon of choice against haze, I came to view gelatin as “powdered time” in that it didn’t do anything cold storage wouldn’t eventually do, but in 2-3 days what gravity alone would take 2-3 weeks to accomplish.

But why bother? When I look around, I see a growing presence of hazy beer from Wit, Hefeweizen, and New England IPA where haze is welcomed and almost revered, to all-sorts of craft beer that’s simply proud to be “unfiltered,” presumably as a distinction from mass-market lagers that are universally bright. Many people seem to appreciate these beers and even favor their hazy nature, so why do I take the time to use gelatin to clear my beer?

Well, I like it. I like the way it looks. I like the way light refracts through to highlight the colors. I also know when drinking it that it will be free of excess yeast in suspension, which I don’t personally care for. There are multiple sources of haze, I know, some that impact flavor, some that seemingly do not. Clear beer avoids both types. When I drink a cloudy beer, I am left questioning– is there a bunch of yeast in suspension? Is it just hop haze? Is it chill haze? Clear beer takes these questions away.

And it’s pretty. Did I mention I like the way it looks?

| MATT |

Quite a bit of debate over hazy vs. non-hazy beer on the old intertubes lately. I think the toughest part about all of it is sorting out everyone’s personal definitions. Labels have been assigned, styles made up, reasons given, and all by people of various degrees of qualification and sanity until you come up with the internet’s equivalent of an agreement– an amalgamation of easily digestible but not quite accurate terms.

We end up asking ourselves a stream of consciousness line of questioning but not really answering anything, which can lead to schizophrenic answers. For example:

What does unfiltered mean and what does it look like? How hazy is hazy? What is a NE IPA? Is that even a thing? Aren’t some beers naturally hazy? Are we just talking hop haze or a specific level of suspended particulate matter? Does not liking hop floaties make me less of a beer drinker? Why would anyone want to drink something called “suspended particulate matter?” Is it made out of hops? Oh, then I’ll try it. That was great/awful! Give me another/dump this and kill it with fire!

Since all of this is not “officially” defined and it is all subject to one’s point of view, I would wager that the correct answer depends on your own personal tastes, training, preferences, and availability of examples of both. Classic brewers raised to compare themselves with the finest of old style German brewers are going to fault anything hazy that does not include “hefe” or a derivative in the title. New wave “punk” brewers are likely to be open to anything that pushes boundaries and creates intense flavors, from souring brews from beard cultures to leaving a veritable green smoothy of lupinoid loveliness in the glass. The truth is, both of these camps are responsible for craft beer as we know it today and both have a legitimate point. So my opinion has limited merit… but so does everyone else’s.

To me, if I can physically feel the particulate on my tongue and it is leaving residue behind, I’m not likely to enjoy the beer. I’ve had a hazy IPA bomb before and my first inclination was to send it back. That there was something wrong with the keg (first/last pour) or they sent me the wrong beer. Not so long ago, that was 98% correct, with the outlier being a new beer that wasn’t as well made as the brewery hoped in an early batch, but it corrected itself going forward (based on specific examples with new breweries after trying their beers). Now, we have to carve out a space and definition for a beer that might just mean to look/feel/taste like that, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it.

If super hazy is how you like your beer, that is how you should drink your beer. However, don’t expect classical brewers or keepers of the style to not at least snort in your direction occasionally. You both have a point. Don’t worry, keep calm, buy them a round. You might change their mind… and it works both ways, even if you do enjoy chewing hop cud.

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