Four exemplary beers in the New England style

The first of the frenzy beers that crazed craft brewers’ groupies fetishized was Heady Topper from The Alchemist, a nanobrewer bloated now to still small craft stature and still based in the ski town (Mad River--ski it if you can) of Waterbury, Vermont. The buzz tormenting Heady Topper has faded, and properly so. It was, and is, good, but the hysteria surrounding its birth was, well, hysterical, and on the retrospective level of the Christian origin myth.

Their beer under consideration is Focal Banger, what would be a classic New England IPA if the style had been around long enough to spawn classics. Two hop varieties and “our favorite British malts,” which are undisclosed and welcome anyway, whatever they are. Lots of haze, 7% alcohol, a profoundly bitter but beguiling, refreshing profile.

The Alchemist remains endearingly eccentric. “Drink this beer today,” the can commands, “you could be dead tomorrow…. ” Obey that command but not the screaming banner--DRINK FROM THE CAN! DRINK FROM THE CAN! DRINK FROM THE CAN!--inadvisably plastered across its lip. The theory that the tang of hop esters would die upon contact with glass deserves the fate of Marxism.

New England beer is not confined to New England and, in the case of a Chicago outpost, the contagion is a happy disease. That is not, however, the case regarding big national factories, masquerading as crafties, who have sought to cash in on the cloudy New England trend. The culprits are Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada. Their alleged NE IPAs are inauthentic and unacceptable. These bland, heavy imposters give credence to the urban myth that unscrupulous companies flour their beer to ape the yeast fused with hop suspension that clouds New England IPAs.

To return to Chicago, and a proper New England IPA born beyond the region, the Silent Disco from Funk Brewing is as good as the style currently gets. This thing is hazier than most of its peers without feeling hairy, fruity but not floral, bitter but only a touch, the unlikely 7% heater for a hot summer day. Hard to find and worth hunting down.

Now for a contrast in terms of notoriety and style. One of the current cultish beers (see, e.g, anything made by the Treehouse Brewery in central Massachusetts); Simcoe pale ale made by Hill Farmstead Brewery in Greensborough Bend, Vermont. It is a New England style beer, the form now prevalent throughout the namesake region, but not for anything other than IPAs, which does make Simcoe most impressive. If it is not the apotheosis of American pale ales, it is very, very good. If, that is, you can find a can.

The best of this exemplary bunch is the 18-Watt session IPA from Single Cut, the destination brewery in the industrial hinterland of Astoria, Queens. It is a session beer, one of the few styles American brewers have struggled to master. Most of them are bland and unpleasant, something analogous to ‘light’ lagers, the even worse reduced calorie versions of bland lagers that themselves are not worth drinking.

They are not, quite, that bad, but few of them approach English stalwarts like Timothy Taylor’s Landlord bitter, a miraculous conundrum combining a retiring ABV under 4% with bellicose balance.