Rise
liquids | hip hops
The
IPA
of the New England Style
Louisville’e’s MiMilee Wide Beer Company Louisvi was the firs firstst Kentuckykyy breweryy to embrace NE IPA PA and now off offers ferss four annua interpretations of the popuar annual popular sty style. y e.
BY ROGER BAYLOR | PHOTOS BY ANDY HYSLOP
The doors at Mile Wide Beer Company
opened at 4 p.m. on a Thursday in early April to a waiting crowd of two dozen craft beer fans, who filed inside and queued in orderly fashion by the bar for the long-awaited NOMAH! release day. In turn, they paid for one or more 4-packs of 16-ounce cans, and most bought a glass of NOMAH! to drink — sometimes two of them. Two of Mile Wide’s owners, Scott Shreffler and Matt Landon, stood taking carry-out sales tickets, bagging purchases, and answering questions from behind a folding table by a pallet stacked neatly with flats of tall boy cans.
Watching the festivities, I couldn’t help thinking about our last trip to New England. My wife’s niece lives in western Massachusetts. She and her husband enjoy craft beer, but they’re not snobs. As working parents of a rambunctious young daughter, there isn’t time for internet ratings and guided tastings — just spare moments for refreshment and relaxation whenever the opportunity arises. Ben keeps his garage fridge packed with regional beer — most of it in cans. Last year during our stay, his larder included lots of hitherto unfamiliar brands of India Pale Ale with mysterious names like Trillium Congress Street, Lord Hobo Boom Sauce and Tree House Julius. We’d pluck a couple of tall boys, pop their tabs and drink straight from the cans. These ales were an intriguing jumble of sensations –
14 Summer 2018 www.foodanddine.com
medium-bodied and complex, flavorful and hoppy, yet curiously thirst-quenching and weirdly lacking bitterness. On the third or fourth time around, curiosity got the best of me and I decided to pour my selection into a tumbler from the kitchen cabinet. The beer was turbid, billowy and opaque; not so long ago, such a milky appearance would have signified either a Bavarian-style unfiltered wheat ale or a catastrophic brewhouse mistake. Suddenly, it all came back to me; the viral Instagram-ability, the hoarding, the trading and swapping – the sheer hysteria. In fact, I was sampling rare sought-after examples of New England IPA, a style now officially recognized by the Brewers Association as “Juicy” or “Hazy” by definition, not happenstance or marketing phraseology.
