Beer and Pavement

I understand that over-hopped (or hyped), unbalanced beer is not everyone’s cup of tea – or glass of beer, but it seems to me that hops is the cure-all for any style of beer. Never was this more apparent to me than a little over a year ago when I tried a hoppy wheat at the Boulevard facility in Kansas City. Since that time, collaborations have been released and now there’s Boulevard’s 80-Acre Hoppy Wheat, a newly-released version of this one-time-brewery-only-release. It’s now available everywhere Boulevard is served and for this, I am thankful.

It seems adding more hops is the way to go. The IPA is maybe most responsible for craft beer’s emergence in the US and it’s also the hoppiest of the hoppy. It has its own rather popular holiday. Brewers push the limits of bitter hoppiness to extremes, even upping the ante for traditional heavyweights of the style. Then we freak out when there’s suddenly a hop shortage, making fresh-hopped and double-hopped beers more valuable. All of these appears to make it imperative that every brewery carry their own hop-bombed IPA and/or DIPA.

The fact that nearly every brewery makes an IPA/DIPA means that hop-heads – myself included – could get their fill. However, this doesn’t seems to be enough. It’s now en vogue to hop the hell out of everything. There are brown ales hopped like IPAs. Saisons with a hoppy bite. No style is safe, but the style that maybe needed additional hops is finally getting the attention it deserves. Wheat ales are now entering super-hopped sector of beer styles and I couldn’t be happier.

Typically, American wheat ales (not Hefeweizens or whatever some brewers try to pass as Hefeweizens these days) feature a slight citrus crispness that makes them ideal for some hop additions. Boulevard and Deschutes seem to be at the forefront of this trend. From the ashes of their Collaboration/Conflux #2 venture, the breweries have released the aforementioned 80-Acre Hoppy Wheat and Chainbreaker White IPA, respectively. I welcome this kind of ingenuity in craft beer. Such innovation just makes sense.

I take a similar view with my own brewing. Sometimes, we just need more hops. Obviously, this applies to the IPAs I primarily brew, but other beers deserve more hops as well. For one, I have my second attempt at my New Slang Saison. When I brewed it before, I didn’t dry-hop it with Sorachi Ace hops. However, this year’s batch deserved a little something extra. So, along with some rosemary, an ounce of leaf hops were added and I should be able to report the results soon. Of course, I suspect they’ll be great.

What other styles could use an infusion of hops? (“All” is probably the only acceptable answer.)