Right: Nick Crandall (photo courtesy of Redhook Brewery). Left: Veronica Vega (photo courtesy of Deschutes). Hazy session IPAs mimic the stronger stuff in everything but alcohol, creating opportunities for sipping-and selling-more beer. They’re using wheat and oats to boost body and mouthfeel, as well as to lend opaque looks, while hops are added at the end of brewing for maximum aroma and flavor and minimum bitterness. Now breweries are rebooting session IPAs and hop-charged pale ales in the model of hazy IPAs, increasingly engineered for low calorie counts. Many versions were based on lean, piney, and resinous West Coast IPAs and ended up too dry, thin, and bitter, like “diet IPA,” Crandall says. “It was really hard to get the body right,” says Nick Crandall, the head brewer of Redhook Brewery, in Seattle. With the major exception of Founders All Day IPA, most market entries flopped, destined for the historical drain. Four years ago, beer and grocery stores were awash with so-called session IPAs, which promised to deliver a standard IPA’s flavor profile with a more moderate ABV of around 4 percent or 5 percent. The low-alcohol IPA is a poster child for contemporary beer’s boom-bust cycle.

“Sometimes,” he says, “we can’t make enough of it.” “We’ve done more than 2,000 barrels in the last 12 months,” O’Donnell says, adding that some summer seasonal accounts were ordering 100 cases weekly. Sales for draft and, in particular, six-packs of 12-ounce cans (retailing for around $11) have ridden a fast-rising elevator to the top of the brewery’s sales charts. Tiny Juicy, as the beer was rechristened, blew through kegs and cans, leading Five Boroughs to slot the beer in its 2019 year-round lineup. “We decided to go after a hazy session IPA with a ton of flavor but 4 percent ABV,” says Kevin O’Donnell, the cofounder and chief operating officer of Five Boroughs, who notes that many hazy IPAs regularly reach 7 percent or 8 percent ABV. It was one of Five Boroughs’s launch beers, offering a hazy IPA’s fruit-charged fragrances, cloudy hue, and smooth body-but minus the knee-buckling alcohol. Staffers batted about ideas until a sales guy suggested revisiting Tiny. Maybe a sustaining saison? A midstrength stout? Another double IPA? Toward the end of Summer 2018, the brewery, based in Brooklyn, New York, needed a beer to bridge warm days and fall’s coming cool. Five Boroughs Brewing faced a seasonal conundrum.

Session ipa abv