In March of 2013 Backlash released its first American styled beer, Salute, a Double IPA featuring Citra and Simcoe hops sourced from Boston Beer Company’s Hop Sharing Program.  Salute received extremely positive reviews and motivated Backlash founder Helder Pimentel to explore the Double IPA style further.

“We were seriously humbled by the response to our first American style beer,” Pimentel said in a recent blog post.  “We’re grateful to have been able to brew such an awesome beer and have our loyal customers drink it like their mouths were on fire.  To keep all our crazy hop head fans happy, we’re going to be rocking out a few other Double IPAs—we’re calling it our “Uprising!” series.  Here’s the concept:  The malt backbone of Salute will remain the same while we rotate through a few different hops/combinations of hops.”

The Uprising! series will include three beers, the first of which Backlash is calling Catalyst. The label art concept of the series borrows from propaganda-style posters and features silhouettes of core Backlash team members. Catalyst includes a profile shot of the unofficial Backlash Beer mascot, an English Bulldog named Stout.

“Catalyst is similar in hop intensity, both in aroma and flavor, to Salute. However the main hop featured in Catalyst is Amarillo, whereas in Salute, the Citra hop was most prominent,” said Pimentel. “Drinkers can expect a more grapefruit-forward profile versus the tropical fruit notes of Salute. Catalyst will check-in at the same ABV and IBU levels as Salute.”

Catalyst boasts an 8.5 percent ABV and about 90 IBUs, which—like Salute—are deceptively smooth. The beer will be available in limited supply in both 22-oz bottles and on draft in the greater Boston area. Smaller amounts will find its way to other parts of Massachusetts. A suggested retail price of $7.99-$8.99 is in-line with other Backlash Beer offerings.

Look for this beer in the VIP tent at our upcoming World Beer Festival-Raleigh as well as in the Beer Talk section of our forthcoming issue of All About Beer Magazine.

The End. See you. Good-bye, thanks for coming. There’s the exit.

…are they gone? Okay, you guys who stuck around to see the credits…you want to hear the real history of craft beer? Not a history of breweries and who bought who, and what city has the biggest bragging rights, but a history about the beer. That’s what beer culture is about, and when it comes down to you and the glass, do you really care what month the brewery opened?

Open up the cooler of any worthwhile beer bar, and you’ll see pale ale, IPA and its big brother Double, hefeweizen, porter and stout—The Dark Twins, some solid craft lagers, some barrel-aged beers, Belgian clones and maybe some of the nifty new sour ales. Each one has a history. It’s not a story of places and water and the discovery of new machines, like the history of European beer. These are New World stories: they’re about the beer, the brewer who made it and the people who liked it. Dig into that cooler and get the real history of the new beers.

From a Small Beginning

What people drank in the 1970s, when all this got started, was mostly something like Budweiser. People were drinking light lager beer from a regional or national brewery—remember, Coors was still a regional brewery at this time—with a few exceptions like Yuengling Porter and Genesee Bock. The mainstream has, if anything, gone lighter yet, as light beer grew to over half the general beer market, while temporary fads cycled through the beer-consciousness: dry beer, ice beer, low-carb beer and the slowly fading malternatives.

But a different, tiny flow branched off from the mainstream when Fritz Maytag bought into the Anchor Brewery in 1968. He wanted to make his beer more like what he thought beer should be, so he went to England to see how they did it. He didn’t like what he saw: added syrups and sugars, not all-malt. Maytag rejected that idea, and fired a shot across the bow of English brewing with Liberty Ale, an all-malt beer with an American hop: Cascade.

One man’s decision started a landslide of craft beer tastes. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale would take the same idea—a smartly hopped, drinkable pale ale—and make a widely-emulated craft brewing flagship out of it. According to the brewery’s long-time head of sales, the late Steve Harrison, “We just made an ale we liked, and we liked the aromatic qualities of the Cascade.”

Maytag didn’t just pioneer hoppy pale ales, either. He started—or re-started—the idea of holiday beers, special seasonal one-offs brewed for the winter holidays, with a beer called Our Special Ale. “I liked the idea of an ale brewed for a festival,” he says. “I called it a gift to our customers, not to make a profit. It has become profitable, but it wasn’t for years.” Other brewers followed the same path, and now a mad profusion of holiday styles—spiced ales, rye porters, barleywines, “winter warmers,” doublebocks—make a colorful display every December.

Up in Portland, Rob and Kurt Widmer found a new direction for wheat beer when someone made a request they couldn’t figure out how to meet. “Carl Simpson at the Dublin Inn asked us to do a third beer,” Rob recalls. The brewers only had two fermenters, and were making altbier and a wheat beer with the altbier yeast.

“We figured if we just didn’t filter the Weizen it would make a third beer,” Rob says. That simple, impulsive business decision was the source of the immensely successful American unfiltered wheat ale, still one of the most popular kinds of craft beer. The Widmers would sell it in draft for as long as they could—laying the foundations of the craft beer bar scene in Portland, along with Kemper’s lagers and Portland Brewing’s ales—then finally go to bottle in the face of burgeoning demand, a demand that spelled success for brewers like Pyramid and Redhook, too.

The other side of Portland’s craft beer scene was, and is, brewpubs. Brewpubs started out a lot like the Widmers: a couple fresh beers, this is what you get. Then they went through a “color beer” phase: golden ale, amber ale, and Something Dark, either a porter or a stout. There’s still some of that around. Brewpubs really hit their stride when places like BridgePort and the McMenamin’s pubs, and Big Time up in Seattle, stepped completely outside that model with IPAs, imperial stouts and barleywines. Brewpubs became and largely remain the experimental edge of American brewing, a brewing laboratory where beers can change on a weekly basis.

The Dark Side

Porter was taking hold on the other side of the mountains. “Porter” may sound like a traditional beer, but it was a shot-in-the-dark re-creation: porter had died out in England. Deschutes brewed up some in Bend, and growing demand sucked them into the Portland market. Black Butte Porter did okay, and no one else was making many dark beers. Brewery president Gary Fish took “a contrarian approach. The dark beer pie was a smaller one, but we could own almost all of it. It worked.” When brewers think about making a porter, Black Butte is often the success they think of.

If you like IPA, the India pale ale that some brewers tried to make “more authentic” by adding oak chips to simulate a long journey by sea (don’t hear much about that bone-headed trend any more, do you?), bow down to the memory of Bert Grant. Grant left an increasingly sissified Canadian brewing industry, hunkered down in the middle of hops country in Yakima, WA, and started throwing hops in his beer. We liked it, and brewers saw how easy it was to step up and vary the flavor of beer by simply adding a wad of hops. More wads followed, and IPA became a staple.

Meanwhile, Jim Koch in Boston, and Steve Hindy and Tom Potter down in Brooklyn, trying to decide what to build their new brewery business on, took a look at what beers were already the most popular in the world: why not brew a lager, but with more body and flavor? Once Koch developed a recipe for Samuel Adams Boston Lager, and Hindy and Potter got a recipe for Brooklyn Lager, they had to figure out how to brew it. Again, they had the same idea: get someone else to do it, someone who already had the equipment, the experience, the connections with suppliers: a contract brewer.

It was an idea and a practice that set off fifteen years of argument over whether “contract beers” were really microbrewed. “It was never a real issue to begin with,” Koch says. “Big brewers like A-B used it to damage the craft brewing industry and distract us from our common ground: brewing great beer.” In the end, that’s what the people decided. While geeks were waving their arms, and brewers were talking mean about each other, bottles of Sam Adams and Brooklyn flew off the shelves. You won’t hear geeks talk much about them, but the results are conclusive: people like craft-brewed lagers.

What people didn’t like was too many of them. Contract-brewing was valid, but it was also an easy way to make a quick grab at a “microbrew” market that was growing around 50 percent annually. Labels were slapped on regional breweries’ output willy-nilly: Hope, Nathan Hale, Trupert, Naked Beer, Red Bell, Red Ass, Bad Frog, Wall Street Lager, Three Stooges. There were the “gay beers,” Black Sheep and Pink Triangle; there were beers that were going to launch national brands, like Brewski and Wanker Light; there were beers with causes, like Rhino Chasers, which pledged to donate money to save the wild rhinoceros (not just a dumb idea, but the fake rhino horn tap handles were so heavy they broke beer spigots).

Behind these brands were marketing geeks, not beer geeks. None of them realized that there has to be a significant difference in the bottle; they thought people were really buying cute labels and quickly crafted minimal backstories. None of them are still around. People shudder when they think about the microbrewery ‘shakeout’ that occurred in the late 1990s. We should look on that time as one of beneficial hardship, of the classic Nitzschean type which did not kill us, making us stronger.

“We’d like the Dorado Double IPA,” I say.

“I don’t see that,” she replies, pointing to pitchers of a variety of Ballast Point Brewing beers.

“It’s right here in the program,” I tell her, pointing to the entry, then to the back of the booth. “And there on that sign.”

“It used to be called Crystal Pier,” Vic says. This doesn’t seem to help.

Granted, there is no mention of it on the table, nor is its name on any of the hand-printed signs hanging from the taps behind her. We step around the table and into the booth, which is probably against GABF rules. We have come for hops, dammit.

“Look, this is the keg,” Vic says, pointing to “Dorado Double” scribbled on the top of one. “We need to tap this.”

He looks at the volunteer. “I know how to do this,” he says, not adding, “I’m a professional,” although he owns a California bar. We are certain this is against GABF rules and know it might even be illegal in Colorado.

“I’ll get my captain,” the volunteer says, appearing interested in pleasing us—that, or we’re seeing a look of total fear.

By now Vic is behind the kegs. “It’s already tapped,” he says. “We’ve just got to make this switch.”

She does, fills a pitcher, and pours us each an ounce of the beer.

“Great nose,” Vic says. “Almost no malt character, bitter all the way through. One of my favorites.”

“This is the style, zeroed in,” I agree, as we step to the booth next door and order the Backstreet Imperial IPA.

Blame It on the Hops

When did we know we were in trouble? Maybe when I described a bitterly hoppy beer as “biscuity.” Or when Vic asked, “Where are we going next?” and the answer was Dogfish Head.

Our mission on this last Thursday in September: To try every double (or imperial) IPA we can find at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. Why? These are extreme beers that take your taste buds on a roller coaster ride as long and furious as, say, the Raptor at Cedar Point in Ohio.

Many are stronger than barley wine, but although we are drinking only an ounce (or less) at a time, these beers are meant for pint glasses rather than snifters. A mother lode of malt allows brewers to jam more than a mother lode of hops into the beer. First and foremost, these are hop delivery vehicles.

Eight years after beer author-brewer-consumer Randy Mosher presented a travelogue of a recent trip to the world’s great hops growing regions to listeners at Oldenberg Beer Camp, an image lingers. He is tilting his head back as if he were taking a big drink, meanwhile reaching his hands into the air and grabbing fistfuls of imagined hops, then bringing them back down to his mouth.

“Americans have been starved for hops so long,” he says, “that right now we’re just shoving them down our throats.”

Just one week later, Blind Pig Brewing brewer Vinnie Cilurzo proved that point by serving GABF attendees the first, as far as anybody knows, commercial double IPA. He brewed Inaugural Ale in June 1994, the first batch out of the Temecula brewery. “Our equipment was pretty antique and crude, so I wanted to start out with something that was big and, frankly, could cover up any off flavors,” he says.

He calculated the bitterness at the time of brewing at 100 IBU (International Bittering Units). It was aged on oak for nine months, was served on the brewery’s first anniversary, and was 15 months old when it reached the GABF.

“After that, we made it a tradition to make DIPAs for our anniversary. At our second anniversary, the beer was 120 BUs. This was almost undrinkable at the time of bottling, but there was a small market for it,” Cilurzo says. “We had a tasting room at our brewery. Customers would bring their Blind Pig growlers back for refills, etc. The last drop of Second Anniversary Ale, out of the brewery’s last keg, filled (Stone Brewing Co. founder) Greg Koch’s growler.”

Operating pretty much in parallel in the Northwest, John Maier of Rogue Ales brewed his first imperial pale ale in 1995, releasing it as I2PA at the 1996 Oregon Brewers Festival. The hops train was picking up speed.

This year, for the first time, “Imperial or Double India Pale Ale” is a separate category in GABF judging and 39 beers are entered.