About two months ago, I reached out to Three Weavers Brewing Company co-founder/brewmaster Alexandra Nowell to talk about the popular hazy IPA style. We ended up chatting about a lot more than that, though, and I felt like I wasn’t doing her justice by including just one little quote in The SOMM Journal’s April/May Beer’d Science column. Additionally, for all of you beer enthusiasts out there who are considering a career in the industry, it might be helpful to know how someone as clever as Nowell carved her own path. So read on for an in-depth Q&A with one of Los Angeles’ most charming, respected brewers, and click here to read the corresponding Beer’d Science column.
Jessie Birschbach: How did you get to where you are now?
Alexandra Nowell: I studied brewing science in college as an elective, but I was on track to go to law school. The elective really captured me though, so I ended up sending in my resume to a lot of places, and Sierra Nevada called me back [for an internship] . . . so my entry to brewing. It allowed me to get my . . . next job that I then spent the next 12 years working my way up from the literal bottom. . . . I met Lynn [Weaver, co-owner of Three Weavers] in 2013 and we opened the brewery in September of 2014.
How do you feel about the hazy IPA style?
We just released a hazy called Cloud City that’s just starting to get out into the broad market. I was curious about the trend and wondered if it would hold on, but it has, and that’s because there’s so much variety within the style itself. There are people who are doing it really well and others who aren’t doing the best job with it. Hazies are inherently fairly unstable; they [need] a lot of care. A lot of people chalk them up to [being a result of lazy brewing], but a lot more intent actually goes into producing a hazy IPA than, for instance, a West Coast IPA, because there’s this concept of stable haze [meaning a beer maintains a consistently cloudy appearance]. It’s not the easiest thing to achieve, because naturally, just through gravity, everything wants to fall out of the beer and make it clear again. So it’s actually quite challenging . . . and there’s a lot of different ways to make [hazy IPAs]. I wanted to be sure that ours stayed true to our ethos and who we are as brewers and [that we weren’t jumping] into a trend just for the sake of it.
What sort of techniques and/or ingredients do you use to make your hazy IPA?
We use a lot of really high protein malts: malted wheat and raw wheat, which is commonly used in wheat beers. . . . We use malted oats that provide a little bit of character but also that pillow-y soft mouthfeel. We do a ton of dry hopping—we’re relying on the polyphenols within the hops themselves to also create some of the haze. We’re fermenting with a more expressive variety of yeast that tends to produce more esters instead of, for instance, Sierra Nevada’s standard Chico ale yeast, [which] is pretty clean and doesn’t provide any additional character. We use any yeast that helps play up the fruity, juicy aroma of the hops.
What are you doing in terms of fining and filtering?
We centrifuge our beers because we like mechanical separation for our clarification. We run our hazy IPAs through the centrifuge because the yeast itself isn’t terribly flocculent, at least when you’re throwing a bunch of hop at it, so in order to create a more stable package—because the beer is going into a can, we need it to have a little bit of shelf life—we remove most of the yeast from the beer.
Why do hazies have a shorter shelf life?
All IPAs have shorter shelf lives because hops are inherently pretty delicate, and hop oils tend to die pretty unceremonious deaths if they’re kept warm. But beers with a lot of yeast in them can have a shorter shelf life too. There’s kind of a flip side to it, right? A little bit of yeast tends to help absorb any oxygen and in turn helps to extend shelf life. But on the other hand, too much yeast in the package can be bad: As the yeast dies and autolyzes, it creates a really off-putting meaty flavor. Also, yeast can be really bitter—it just doesn’t taste good. A little bit is great, but not too much.
How do you feel about the hazy trend?
The hazy IPA really isn’t a trend anymore—it’s become a staple [within IPAs] and it’s really helped to emphasize how delicate beer is. But that said, not everyone is doing it right. Package quality has lot to do with it too. A lot of small breweries just don’t have the resources to get a really sound can. There’s a lot of oxygen in the can and that’s sort of the first step to the beer dying.
How do you feel about the hazy style in general?
I enjoy some of them. I have a problem with really cloying beer, and some are just too sweet. But I love the aroma and what the yeast does with the hops when they play together well. But I want to be refreshed by a beer, and the reality is that there are quite a few hazies out on the market that just don’t refresh me. But there are a lot that are doing well. To some degree, people are drinking these beers with their eyes, which is really interesting. Brewing tradition for many years has led us to believe that clear beer is better, but consumers have pulled us in the opposite direction, and we know this based on what they’re buying.
What should our readers know about Three Weavers and/or beer in general?
I want Three Weavers to be known for producing incredibly high-quality and always balanced beers that you just want to drink more of. I also want them to know to always keep their beer cold so that it stays fresh!
