Has the Great Hazy IPA Debate Finally Been Settled?

For nearly as long as the hazy IPA has been a fixture of craft beer, so, too, has arguing about it. In the mid-2010s, haze masters like Other Half Brewing Company, Trillium Brewing and Tree House Brewing Company hit their stride and helped build line culture with their coveted, limited releases. Other breweries saw the kind of demand that made people queue up at 4 a.m. and added hazy IPAs to their own lineups. And the more hazies that showed up on tap lists across the United States, the more some brewers and many craft beer enthusiasts began mocking hazy IPAs on Twitter and bemoaning their ubiquity on Reddit. Some even believed hazy IPAs would be craft beer’s ruin, the end of its celebrated creativity.

A recent article by writer Stephen Beaumont for JustDrinks kicked the haze debate back up, but this time, there’s a vibe shift. Instead of yet another piece of doom journalism laying the blame for the death of craft beer at the hazy IPA’s feet — which, by the way, Beaumont says in a phone chat, some readers have misinterpreted his story to be — it’s a measured look at whether the booming popularity of hazies simply narrowed the field of options craft beer was originally built on to something too limited. The responses online have been less reactive “down with hazy IPAs!” tweets and more thoughtful “here are some pros and cons” conversations and even some “actually, hazies may have helped the craft beer industry, for a few years, anyway”-type comments.

This more pragmatic discussion of the hazy IPA seems like yet another sign of the industry’s maturation. It’s similar to how a decade ago it was de rigueur for craft beer drinkers to all but riot when a craft brewery sold to a macro player, and now such mergers and acquisitions elicit barely a shrug. In 2024, craft beer is not some cool kids’ club where styles are guarded and drinkers are judged. It’s just another industry within the overall beverage alcohol marketplace. There’s less derision surrounding the hazy IPA, more clarity around its impact on craft beer at large and more willingness to give credit where it’s due. Even through the haze, hindsight is 20/20.

This new stage indeed prompts a look back at how we got here. Why did the hazy IPA aggravate so many craft beer drinkers and even professionals? Did it actually deserve such ire? What does the hazy’s place in craft beer today look like?

The Hazy IPA Arrives, Invites More Drinkers and Annoys Craft Beer Geeks

Hazy IPAs’ mainstream arrival hit around 2011. Heady Topper from Vermont brewery The Alchemist is typically referred to as the beer that sparked the movement, even if it’s less hazy than today’s tropical, juicy hop bombs. Heady Topper and its ilk fit right into the oneupmanship of craft beer’s creativity, delivering on everything drinkers expected from their brewers — brewers who had built an industry on combating the sameness of Big Beer’s watery light lagers with a whole array of different styles both traditional and innovative.

“Craft breweries helped diversify the types of beer available, with many focusing on styles of British origin, like the IPA,” says Dan Gadala-Maria, head brewer at New York City’s Finback Brewery. “Americans always want ‘more,’ though, and the bitter, resinous IPAs that had emerged [in craft beer] were unapproachable to the average drinker.”

Indeed, the West Coast IPAs and the IBU Wars of aggressively bitter beers were a secret handshake for craft beer connoisseurs. Drinks writer and author Aaron Goldfarb points out that by 2010, “IPA was a signifier of who was a beer geek and who wasn’t. They were seen as so bitter and repulsive to the common drinker, if you drank them, you were seen as a beer geek or hipster.”

Cue the hazy IPA’s entrance. The start of the 2010s brought a pendulum swing from the IBU Wars — a sweeter, fruitier, juicier one, but one that was extreme all the same. Excited about yet another example of brewers’ inventiveness and a new style with huge flavors to dive into, many craft beer enthusiasts greeted hazies with open arms.

“Those Vermont proto-hazy IPAs were an absolute sensation,” Goldfarb says. “Anyone saying there was backlash from the start is lying.” And unlike West Coast IPAs, hazies weren’t just for the beer geeks. They extended this new invitation into craft beer for people who had been turned off by overly bitter beers. From longtime dedicated connoisseurs to people less committed to craft beer but simply interested in these smoothie-adjacent brews, hazies became the most common request in bars and taprooms.

“It caught on with a new generation of drinkers,” Beaumont says. “I know people who operate beer bars who…had people coming in and asking, ‘What do you have that’s hazy?’” This wasn’t without precedent, he adds, since during the West Coast IPA’s reign, people went into beer bars inquiring after whatever was “hoppiest.” “But in the case of hazy IPAs, you had this cohort of relatively new, relatively young beer drinkers…it was the only thing they knew about and wanted to hear about.”

Is Craft Beer Cringe Right Now?

Years ago, loving an IPA meant you were hip. What happened?

That exact phenomenon, though, quickly wore on the longstanding craft beer ride-or-dies. At the time, craft beer earned its hipster associations best with an attitude comparable to one among under-the-radar music fans. The same way an obscure band’s devotees felt resentment toward new fans if that band suddenly blew up, many craft beer geeks felt annoyed that hazy IPAs had brought in the masses. It was a collective chip on the shoulder that only deepened as line culture flourished.

In 2017, Goldfarb wrote for PUNCH how Other Half “became the official beer of Wall Street.” The story examined how Other Half’s hazies had become a status symbol with a crowd about as far outside of the craft beer community as could be. Moneyed finance bros paid TaskRabbits to wait in lines so they could later behold a four-pack of some nearly impossible-to-snag hop bomb at a party. For many protective craft beer enthusiasts, this was a nightmare. Craft beer had not only hit the mainstream, but the very idea of it — quality and craft, not status and elitism — had been distorted. And it was all hazy IPAs’ fault.

It seemed like it was everyone else who had become obsessed with hazy IPAs, outside of the craft beer geeks. As Goldfarb points out, conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch smelled a cash cow and bought craft operations to pump hazies out on a massive scale, and those IPAs showed up on airplanes and in sports arenas, places styles like West Coast IPAs had never cracked. The masses couldn’t get enough, but the beer connoisseurs who went to taprooms every weekend expecting variety grew weary of the increasing sameness of hazy offerings.

A Few Brewers Make Loud Complaints; Others Make Great Hazies

Brewers began expressing exasperation, too. As much as craft drinkers expected creativity, many brewers expected to be able to flex it, and they felt pressured to continuously churn out the same hazies ad infinitum. The problem with this attitude, though, is it ignores the pesky truth that breweries are indeed businesses — businesses that need to keep consumers happy in order to make money.

“One of the hardest narratives in craft beer is this oft-repeated phrase: Brewers will say, ‘We brew what we like to drink and hope other people like it, too,’” says Bryan Roth, managing editor and podcast host at Good Beer Hunting. “For some, that’s probably the case, and they’re lucky they…have an enraptured audience in place and they can kill it by doing only exactly what they want to do. For many businesses, though, and not just breweries, you have to listen to your customers.”

“I think at first brewers…didn’t have a tremendous amount of interest in it,” says beer writer and author Jeff Alworth. “When the hype machine hit, I think they were a little cold to what they saw as quite variable beer getting such incredible praise and attention. In the early stages, hazies were frankly beta-version beers, and a lot of them were pretty bad. Professional brewers tend to get excited about interesting trends if they’re really well-executed, but they can be put off by hype-y trends based on beer they don’t think is well-made.” It was often the brewers who resentfully felt forced to make hazies that then produced less-than-stellar versions. When those entered the market, they further soured many drinkers on the style.

However, Alworth calls these brewers a vocal minority. America’s thousands of breweries could be split into four categories: a small group who make (potentially bad) hazy IPAs and gripe about it; a small group who lean into creativity and innovation within the style; a small group able to build cult followings with lagers or farmhouse ales and eschew the hazy pressure all together; and the largest group, who, as Gadala-Maria points out, realize they don’t need to center their entire businesses around hazies but understand it’s wise to have one or two high-quality hazy offerings for customers.

Examples within that second small group, breweries focused on experimentation within hazies, make a case for the style’s ability to evolve, differentiate, showcase new things and intrigue. Those who simply don’t like hazies may not give haze-dominant breweries like Other Half a chance, but those who do find tap lists full of iterations that, yes, do all taste different with different hops and techniques taking center stage. Endeavors like Tree House’s Project Find the Limit series, in which each beer features a heavier dry-hop, demonstrate that in the right hands, hazies are about as far from a lazy style as can be. The amount of aromatic dry-hopping they require can yield harsh green, vegetal flavors when not handled carefully. Good hazies — loaded with different fruity hop aromas balanced by just the right amount of bitterness, with a touch of heft to the mouthfeel and no burn or green flavors — require good brewers.

It’s a challenge plenty still find worthwhile. Roth points to Scott Janish, cofounder of Maryland’s Sapwood Cellars, who continuously explores the science of IPAs in general, very much including hazy IPAs, even authoring The New IPA: A Scientific Guide to Hop Aroma and Flavor. More breweries known to excel at the balance include Chicago’s Hop Butcher; Oklahoma City’s Skydance Brewing; Foam Brewers in Burlington, Vermont; Fidens Brewing in Albany, New York; Great Notion in Portland, Oregon (with other Pacific Northwest locations); and Monkish Brewing Co. in Los Angeles.

“The creative brewer will have no trouble using modern ingredients to make countless takes on the hazy,” Gadala-Maria says. Brewing hazies can even help brewers improve all around, says Jake Gardner, head brewer at Colorado’s Westbound & Down Brewing Company.

“We spent tons of time on research and development to create Juice Caboose,” he says. “The process taught us a ton, not just about hazy production but about making West Coast IPA, as well. The different mindset of super-reduced bitterness got us to focus on ideas like…loading up most hop usage in the dry hop, a higher attention to thiols both bound and free, to biotransformation, and to other yeast-and-hop interactions in a way I don’t think would have happened for us, or industry-wide, without the advent of the hazy IPA.”

How Hazies Helped, Not Hurt, Craft Beer

Pulling apart the exaggerated mythology that brewers hate hazies and they’re the death of all creativity begins unraveling the entire narrative around the style as the scourge of craft beer. For one thing, just as a vocal minority of brewers sold the story that every professional in the industry hated making this style, it may have been just a vocal minority of consumers insisting hazies had completely taken over every tap list to the detriment of all other styles. While the widespread insatiable thirst for hazies has indeed influenced what many brewers make, leading at least to a temporary flattening of variety — an issue Beaumont’s story discusses — other styles never entirely disappeared.

In reality, hazy IPAs may have actually helped, not hurt craft beer as an industry. This is in large part due to that accessibility. More consumers equal more sales; you can’t argue that. While craft beer has finally now matured into an industry characterized by challenges instead of limitless brewery openings, the explosion of hazy IPAs onto the scene might have helped prolong that inevitable fate.

“I think craft was in major danger of stagnating had [hazy IPA] not come along,” says Doug Veliky, chief marketing officer at Chicago’s Revolution Brewing and author of the Beer Crunchers Substack newsletter. “I wouldn’t say it extended [the industry’s] plateau, but that it created a plateau.”

In 2018, Roth says a collection of almost 1,700 hazy IPA brands accounted for a little under five percent of IPAs and 1.5 percent of all craft beer sold in chain retail. By 2023, those hazies were 24 percent of IPAs and almost 9.5% of craft beer sold in chain retail. This increase in volume share, Roth explains, is both the growth of hazies and the shrinking of the overall craft beer pie. It also puts the real trajectory of hazy IPA into perspective: It’s never stomped all over craft beer and stolen volume from all other styles — even if skewed, problematic Untappd ratings make it seem otherwise — but it has performed strongly as a key player in keeping craft beer relevant. A not insignificant factor in that growth, too, is the powerhouse brands bigger craft breweries have made wide-reaching, crowd-pleasing hits, like Sierra Nevada’s Hazy Little Thing.

The fact is, hazy IPAs built a bridge from craft beer’s previous if-you-know-you-know identity to a newer, more accessible one. And while normies lining up for hop bombs may have come as a shock to beer geeks in the mid-2010s, hating on the style for that approachability is, Roth says, gatekeeping.

“It’s helped businesses of all sizes,” he explains. “And we shouldn’t dismiss something that has brought consumers joy in anyway. If something helps bring people in doors, that’s an on-ramp to help more people enjoy beer.” Anyway, while hazies are certainly not a bubble with a looming burst as many predicted in the height of their explosion, they are subject to consumer whims and changing industries like anything else, and we’re seeing a resurgence of characteristic variety in craft beer. In 2024’s average taproom, hazies live happily alongside Czech-style lagers on LUKR taps, pale ales and ESBs on cask, mixed- and spontaneous-fermentation beers and more. Hazy IPAs far from killed craft beer’s creativity; they helped broadcast it to more people, and for that, they’re finally getting a little respect.