Hop history: How the American IPA was created

It was winter 2010 and Vinnie Cilurzo noticed a line had formed outside of his Russian River Brewing Co. in Santa Rosa, California.

“My life changed that day,” Cilurzo recalls. “I went out and asked them what they were all waiting for.

“They were like ‘We are waiting for your beer, dummy.’ ”

It was the release party for the triple India pale ale called Pliny The Younger, an extremely hoppy beer that would sell out in one day. Now when Russian River releases the beer over a two-week period every February, people camp out in line for several hours.

It’s one of the many signs that the IPA is currently king in craft beer. This year, the style is expected to account for a record 27.5 percent of all craft beer sales.

And while the IPA has a history traced back to British exports in the 1700s, Cilurzo is credited as pioneering a more extreme version — known in different forms as an American IPA, double IPA, imperial IPA and West Coast IPA — that dominates the U.S. market today.

At the 2015 Great American Beer Festival there were a contest-high 336 entries for the American-style IPA category, followed by 208 for the imperial IPA.

“For my money, Vinnie invented the American-style IPA,” said Jim Koch, founder of Sam Adams. “Today what we think of as an IPA is not the traditional English IPA. Hops have changed the taste and character.

“We had already used hops for aromatic characteristics, but the breakthrough was using American hops designed for bitterness.”

Cilurzo first fell in love with making beer as an 18-year-old in the cellar of his parents winery.

“I knew after the first homebrew batch that I’d go on to do this professionally,” Cilurzo said. “Just like a lot of people, it was this hobby that got out of control. And having grown up at a winery, fermentation came naturally to me.”

Cilurzo first learned about the IPA style in Charlie Papazian’s book “The Joy of Home Brewing,” which chronicled the folklore legend of the British Empire shipping beer in oak barrels to India, using a high amount of hops in an attempt to preserve the flavor as it traveled on ships.

Cilurzo turned his attention to making mostly traditional English IPAs.

“I spent the first year and a half really honing in on that recipe — like nine out of the 10 batches I’d do would be IPAs,” Cilurzo said. “I made it over and over again because I wanted to get really good at making this one beer.”

His future wife Natalie, Russian River’s current president, sampled his homebrew on one of their first dates.

“I was a newbie beer drinker and only 21 but I really liked it,” Natalie said. “I had never been introduced to good beer before. My dad either drank Miller Lite when he was on a diet or Budweiser when he wasn’t.

“But after having Vinnie’s homebrew, I was hooked.”

Vinnie’s own beer purchases slowly turned to beers with higher hop flavor.

He specifically cites Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale and Anchor Brewing Co.’s Liberty Ale as early influences. Both beers remain staples in his personal fridge today.

“Consumers now look at those beers and think they are pedestrian,” Vinnie said. “But that doesn’t tell the whole story. When I started those beers were big and bold. Those beers deserve a lot of credit.

“They laid the groundwork for the beer industry today.”

When Vinnie decided to start his own brewery in 1994, he needed his first batch of beer to really count.

The now defunct brewpub started with used equipment, which included a plastic-covered fermenters purchased from “Electric” Dave Harvan of Bisbee, Arizona.

“I couldn’t afford to dump it out,” explains Cilurzo, who planned to make only a few thousand dollars a year at Blind Pig Brewing Co. in Temecula, California.

“The idea was to make a beer with so many hops in it that if the flavors didn’t turn out, the hop flavor would cover it up.”

The beer was called the Inaugural Ale and was aged on oak chips. It’s considered the first commercial double IPA in U.S. craft beer.

“The was a small but loyal contingent following for those early IPAs,” Cilurzo said. “A lot of people were shocked when they tasted it.”

Adds Natalie: “I remember people would say ‘The beer is too hoppy,’ and that it was out of balance.”

The recipe returned for the brewpub’s anniversaries. Other breweries started making anniversary IPAs as well.

But business at Blind Pig was far from profitable. Vinnie worked close to 80 hours a week at the brewery. Natalie had a full-time job in the wine industry and went to college at night.

“I remember going to (Vinnie’s) parents on Sunday night to eat dinner and then putting all the leftovers in Ziploc baggies to be four more nights of food,” Natalie said. “Today if you make good beer you can probably make it. But it always wasn’t like that.

“The majority of consumers just weren’t ready for craft beer.”

And while Blind Pig eventually closed, its effect is felt today. Russian River even makes a Blind Pig IPA as an ode to the Inaugural Ale recipe.

“I certainly never thought the IPA would become the top selling style in craft beer,” Vinnie said. “It’s interesting to me how the tastes of beer drinkers have changed so drastically.

“It’s sort of like with wine drinkers, as the more experienced they get, the bolder the flavors they look for.”

When Cilurzo started homebrewing, there were only two experimental hops readily available. They were known as CFJ-4 and CFJ-90, which later became known as Centennial hops.

“At that time, all hop breeding was geared toward industrial brewers,” Cilurzo explains.

When he started Blind Pig, hops were inexpensive. And he just ordered the hops when he needed.

Vinnie, who started brewing at Russian River in 1997 and purchased an ownership interest in 2003 with Natalie, now orders his hops in five-year contracts.

“Hops are now a complex business with multiple breeding programs that’s really geared toward the craft brewer,” Cilurzo said.

The Pliny The Younger release at Russian River now requires months of planning.

“It’s fun but it’s also really stressful because expectations are high,” Natalie said. “We want to make sure people are getting what they came for.”

With the popularity of IPAs and the number of breweries in the country surpassing 4,000 earlier this year — and most offering an IPA — the price of hops is increasing as their availability decreases.

The USDA projected hop production to increase by 13 percent in 2015. Still, some experts are forecasting a 2016 hop shortage.

“The next challenge to brewers will be how to use hops more efficiently,” Vinnie said. “There’s lots of possibilities, we just need to continue to experiment.”

About this series

The #Beer Insider is a series that looks at brewery trends and news around the country.

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