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Two of the New England-style India Pale Ales (IPAs) from Upstate Brewing Co. near Elmira: Double and Winter IPA. Most of Upstate's IPAs are now brewed in the hazy and hoppy-but-not-bitter New England style.

(Mark Neumann / Upstate Brewing C)

They're called New England-style IPAs, or sometimes Northeast-style. They're nicknamed "juice bombs."

Isaac Rubenstein of Middle Ages Brewing Co. in Syracuse with Single Batch #8, a 'New England-style" India Pale Ale.

They're often referred to as hazy, for good reason. They can look like a glass of orange juice, with the pulp.

These cloudy and hoppy-yet-not-overly bitter versions of India Pale Ale have become the hottest trend in craft beer in the past few years (except maybe for sour beers).

They started in New England, of course, at brewers like The Alchemist in Vermont (the beer is the cult favorite Heady Topper), and brewers like Trillium in Boston and Treehouse Brewing in Monson, Mass.

Now they're sweeping across Upstate New York. It began a few years ago with just a couple of Upstate brewers taking a shot at them, like Sloop Brewing Co. in the Hudson Valley and Upstate Brewing Co. near Elmira.

Last year, Prison City Pub & Brewery in Auburn won national recognition for its New England-style IPA, called Mass Riot.

Mass Riot IPA from Auburn's Prison City Brewing Co.

This winter, they really caught fire among Upstate brewers.

Here's a sign: Two of the Syracuse area's older craft breweries, Empire Brewing and Middle Ages Brewing, have both released New England or Northeast-style IPAs this winter.

In Canandaigua, the Naked Dove Brewing Co. last week released its take on the style, called Clarity in the FLX IPA. As the name implies, it's a little clearer than most.

Tim Butler, director of brewing operations for Empire Brewing Co., with Particle City, a 'New England' style India Pale Ale.

So what makes a beer a New England-style IPA? There are two main characteristics:

* Haziness. This comes partly from the use of oats and sometimes wheat in the brew, and partly from the type of yeast the brewer uses. Unlike many other beer styles, they are not filtered. Some of the early versions had visible chunks of solid material floating around. They just look different than most pale ales and IPAs.

* They're loaded with hops, which typically give beer both bitterness and aromas like citrus, pine or fruit. But in the case of the New England style, the hops don't add much bitterness. That's because brewers use hop varieties noted for aroma more than bitterness, and they add most of them later in process, which cuts down the bitterness quotient. The hop varieties used -- like Citra, Mosaic, and Simcoe -- are especially noted for tropical fruit aromas.

In many ways, the New England IPAs are a reaction to, or against, the older trend to increasingly hopped IPAs, which grew out of the so-called "West Coast" style. Those have become ever more hopped up and bitter, and the aromas often have hints of pine and resin along with fruit.

A cloudy New England-style IPA from Upstate Brewing Co. near Elmira. Some beers in this style resemble orange juice, with the pulp.

"For so long, you had people adding more hops, and more hops and more hops," said Mark Neumann, brewer and owner at Upstate Brewing Co. "They were so bitter they were almost undrinkable. So this style uses hops, but doesn't overdo the bitterness.

"The IPAs were beginning to taste like crap," he said. "Now we have these IPAs that are softer, fruitier and juicier. And they're popular."

They are hopped-up beers for people who don't like, or think they don't like, hops. They burst with tropical fruit flavor.

Making this beer requires brewers accustomed to making the older styles of American IPAs to change their methods. That's especially true of a traditional brewery like Middle Ages, which typically makes English-style beers with a balance of hops and malt.

Single Batch #8, a 'New England-style" India Pale Ale from Middle Ages Brewing Co. in Syracuse.

"There are probably ten things we did in this beer that we've never done before," said Isaac Rubenstein, who produced the beer named Middle Ages New England IPA, or Single Batch #8. That includes using a different yeast and hops, lower brewing temperatures and allowing the beer to remain cloudy.

He had the idea to make one a year ago, but it took months to gather the resources to do it, including the hops and the yeast strain (which comes from a noted New England IPA producer). Rubenstein thinks the effort is worth it.

"It's the fact that you get a lot of hops but not the bitterness that makes people really like them," he said.

Particle City, a 'New England-style" India Pale Ale from Empire Brewing Co. in Syracuse and Cazenovia.

At Empire Brewing, the new beer is made at the company's new farm brewery in Cazenovia and is on tap there and at the original brewpub in Syracuse's Armory Square, along with other accounts. Empire brewing director Tim Butler calls it a "Northeast-style," because "we're in New York, not New England."

Empire calls the beer Particle City. "One of our brewers poured it out of the tank and held it up and looked at the haze and said, 'Wow, that's particle city, man,' " Butler said.

"Initially people are freaked out by the haze," he said of the New England/Northeast style. "Now they demand it.''

Butler also had to figure out new methods, especially how to handle a huge load of hops added at the end stages of the brewing process.

The result, in Empire's case, is a real "juice bomb" of a beer with lots of tropical aroma and not much bitterness.

Mark Neumann at Upstate Brewing made his first New England-style IPA in November 2015. That put his brewery, located just outside Elmira in Horseheads, well ahead of many others in New York. It proved to be so popular, Upstate now makes most of its IPAs in the New England-style, switching ingredients like the hop varieties to change things up between batches.

"At first with the haze, nobody made a big fuss about it even though it was unusual," he said. "Now everybody seems to love it. So we jumped in with both feet and do them all the time."

Clarity in the FLX IPA, a new 'New England-style' India Pale Ale from Naked Dove Brewing Co. in Canandaigua.

The newest Upstate New England-style IPA, released last week, is the Clarity in the FLX IPA, made by co-owner and brewer Dave Schlosser at Naked Dove Brewing Co.

For Schlosser, it was a hard decision.

"I'm really a traditionalist," he said. "I come from the position that even an unfiltered beer should be clear."

So when he decided to make one, he pushed back a little against the standards of the style. It's not only clearer (though unfiltered), it keeps more of the hop bitterness than some of the others.

"The bitterness is there, but it's not overwhelming," he said. Sales, he said, have been "extremely brisk."

One of the other characteristics of the New England-style IPAs is the belief that the aromatic quality of the hops can disappear with time, meaning they are best sold and drunk fresh. That's one reason beer fans began camping out or waiting in line whenever a new batch is released.

That's another area where Schlosser pushes back a little.

"It's obviously a beer that's best when fresh," he said. "But if you brew it right, it should have a shelf life like any other beer."

Don Cazentre writes about craft beverages for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Contact him by email, on Twitter, at Google+ or via Facebook.