What Does IPA Mean With Beer? Beer!

Unless you’ve been living a retro lifestyle, you’ve undoubtedly noticed a proliferation of craft beer over the past couple decades. And along with that scene, you’ve noticed this India Pale Ale (IPA) thing seems really popular. It’s something you always mean to look up, just not while you’re hanging out at the brewery. So let’s go ahead and get it out of the way. What does IPA mean with beer? Here’s a quick answer.

 

The Super Basics

Beer—in its simplest form—is a non-distilled alcoholic beverage made from the strategic combination of malted grains, water, hops, and yeast. The malted grains provide sugar, hops add flavor (and can assist in preservation), and yeast convert the sugar to alcohol (i.e. promote fermentation).

The two broad categories under which most beers can be classified are lager and ale, and the key differentiating factor between the two boils down to the type of yeast used.

Lagers are brewed with bottom-fermenting yeast strains that operate at colder temperatures (around 40-52ºF), and ales are brewed with top-fermenting strains that work at warmer temperatures (around 55-77ºF).

As you might imagine, things can get a bit more complicated than this oversimplification would suggest, but unless you work at a brewery, this degree of knowledge should suffice for now.

 

A Bit More on Ales

Hanging out under the umbrella of ales (among many others) is something called a pale ale. The word pale in this case simply refers to the light color of the grains used in the brewing process.

And in the category of pale ale lies our friend, the India pale ale, or IPA.

What exactly earns a pale ale the right to be called an IPA? That answer seems to get a little murky, but IPAs tend to have a greater hop content (contributing to increased bitterness, quantified by the IBU scale) and higher alcohol by volume. As the latter increases, you could even come across the terms double IPA or imperial IPA.

 

The Story

At this point, you’re probably wondering what the heck India has to do with any of this. The answer—at least the one that is widely circulated—takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when the British were slowly starting to take over the world.

The British East India company had established a foothold in India, meaning that British sailors were regularly making the trip from the UK to the Indian subcontinent. And clearly, that trip could not be made without beer.

British pale ales that were being made with a higher hop content (and often greater alcohol by volume) became a preferred companion during the voyage, as the hops and alcohol served as natural preservatives throughout the long journey. The ability to successfully ship these beers also opened up a new market for the product.

Somewhere along the way, this type of pale ale came to be known as India pale ale, eventually making its way into the repertoire of brewers across the world.

After a drop in popularity during the first part of the 20th century, the 1970s saw small brewers in the US begin to revive the IPA, infusing it with unique flavors provided by numerous varieties of American hops.

From there, you know the rest—in the early 21st century, small breweries began to pop up all over the place, each offering its own take on the IPA. And given American expertise in exporting culture, the US-inspired trend has since spread worldwide.

 

So what does IPA mean with beer? As the title indicates, it means beer.