I’ve probably had a few beers labeled “Cold IPAs” over the past year or two, but sitting with my wife at HenHouse Brewing here in Petaluma and drinking their new Ales for ALS beer—a “Cold IPA” with Ahtanum, Citra, Ekuanot, and Loral hops—was the first time I’d stopped and asked myself what a Cold IPA actually was. I’m pretty sure I’d been thinking of the Brut IPAs and India Pale Lagers of the past, and wrote Cold IPAs off as “this too shall pass.”

So… after reading way too many articles on the topic, the best I can make sense of this is as follows: Cold IPAs tend to use adjuncts (corn, rice, etc.) in their malt bill but generally avoid caramel/crystal malts; they are firmly hopped like a West Coast IPA, usually with a lot of dry hopping; and they’re fermented with either lager yeast or a combo of ale and lager yeasts, at a slightly warmer temperature (for lager yeast) than usual to avoid sulfur production. I’m not convinced that there’s any real clear distinction between Cold IPAs and India Pale Lagers, as the arguments of “Cold IPAs are hoppier” and “Cold IPAs don’t have sulfur” overlook the reality that there were hoppy-ass and low-sulfur IPLs well before anyone smashed the words “cold” and “IPA” together… But I think maybe I’ve seen too many IPAs for one lifetime.

That all said… Beers aiming for this particular part of the flavor spectrum can be pretty darn tasty and focused in their intent: crispy, clear, distraction-free showcases of HOPS. And it’s kinda hard to argue with that. This curiously hopped HenHouse one was delicious.

Gruits tend to be understood today as beers that use something other than hops to provide their bittering elements. But that sense of hops as an essential part of beer—alongside water, barley, and yeast, and sometimes a few other things—is a relatively recent one. In The Oxford Companion to Beer’s entry on gruits (written by the reliable Dick Cantwell, and referencing the key text “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers” by Stephen Harrod Buhner), gruits are described as “a generic term referring to the herb mixtures used to flavor and preserve beer before the general use of hops took hold in the 15^th and 16^th centuries in Europe.” So, 500 years of hop dominance (ballpark) for a beverage that’s been around since (ballpark) at least 7,000 BCE.

Gruit mixtures varied depending upon what was locally available—but common inclusions were sweet gale/bog myrtle, yarrow, and wild rosemary, while all sorts of other ingredients could be included as well: ginger, caraway, juniper, cinnamon… even some hops. While the socio-economic influences that led to the shift away from these (sometimes psychotropic…) ingredients is way past what I could possibly fit into this column space, it’s pretty fascinating for anyone who’d like an herbaceous deep dive into weird beer history.

Gruits are still pretty uncommon on the whole, with some of my favorites over the past 10 years or so being Upright’s Special Herbs (which hasn’t been made in years) and Moonlight Brewing’s gruit-inspired seasonal Working for Tips (which uses fresh redwood branches instead of hops). A recent SF Chronicle cited the efforts of Moonlight, Woods Beer, and Mad Fritz here in the Bay Area as being a local resurgence of gruit—but a lot of the stuff mentioned is either super limited or been around for a while. Gruits are still pretty far out there in our hop-centic beer world today, but they can also offer a neat peak into our past.