Author: Marshall Schott

IPA is currently all the rage and has been for the better part of the last two decades. It seems beer drinkers just can’t get enough hoppy goodness to satiate their seemingly bottomless desires, which likely explains the development of numerous off-shoot versions of this popular style, one of the more recent being Brut IPA.

Invented by Kim Sturdavant of the shuttered Social Kitchen and Brewery¸ Brut IPA was designed to pair the hoppiness of American IPA with the dryness of champagne, hence the name. To accomplish this, the grist often consists primarily of Pilsner malt with some also preferring to add a dose of simple sugar. However, the neatest trick to maximizing attenuation and ultimate dryness of Brut IPA lies not in traditional brewing processes or ingredients, but rather the use of exogenous enzymes that break starches from malt down to simpler sugar that is more readily metabolized by yeast.

Given its uniqueness, Brut IPA is considered a specialty IPA and thus falls under category 21B in the BJCP Guidelines, which is yet to include an official description of this novel style. As such I’ll defer to the description provided by Amahl Turczyn of Zymurgy:

A very pale, very dry, highly effervescent variant of American IPA, usually highly hopped with aromatic hops, but with far less actual bitterness.

When Brut IPA first hit the scene, I tried every commercial example I could get my hands on, as I found the idea of a crisp, clear, dry, clear, refreshing, and especially clear IPA quite appealing. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a fan of most, in fact the only ones I enjoyed were brewed by House Of Pendragon and Riley’s Brewing, both local to me. Perhaps because of this, I wasn’t terribly interested in making a Brut IPA myself, that is until I was contacted by the folks from Novozymes asking if I might be interested in trying some of their brewing enzyme products. Wet behind the ears, I took this as an opportunity to step outside of my brewing comfort zone and experiment with brewing an atypical style using an atypical approach.

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