American pale ale; an icon of the craft beer revolution
American pale ale
- Alcohol: 4.5% - 6%
- Color: yellow to light amber
- IBU: 20 - 40
- Details: American hops are often used during brewing.
Surely the style father of this beer type is Anchor brewing's Liberty ale. It is one of the first beers brewed with cascade hops. Tasting this beer will be difficult because unfortunately the brewery will be closed in 2023.
American pale ale has a fruity flavor that goes well with pizza. Choose a pizza with tomato sauce, parmesan cheese and some serrano ham. These are all ingredients that have an umami flavor that goes well with fruity beer types. Just be careful not to go too bitter with your beer!
Global characteristics
A style of beer that ushered in the American craft beer revolution that subsequently took over the world. You know those guys with buns who stand next to you in your favorite beer bar and always order an IPA out of 20 different beers? Only to then tell whoever-hears-will-a real beer lover? Surely the American pale ale is somewhat to blame for that. This light-colored beer type with a distinct hop character quickly captured the hearts of many beer drinkers who had outgrown lager. In addition, the American Pale Ale is the ancestor of other hoppy beer styles such as the India Pale Ale and the New England IPA.
History
The American Pale Ale (or sometimes called APA) derives from the English beer type, the pale ale. For the history of this beer, we go across the channel toward the British Isle. Here people used to malt by wetting the barley and then heating it with peat or wood. This gave the malt a smoky flavor and often colored the malt as we know it with roasted malts such as Roasted Barley. This changed in the 18th century as breweries increasingly used coal for malting their grains. Coal has the ability to give off less smoke and, therefore, burn the grains less quickly. Thus, brewers were enabled to make lighter malts and this in turn logically resulted in a lighter beer type, ergo the Pale Ale. This beer type in turn consisted of several sub-types such as the IPA, Bitter-, or the Belgian Pale Ale. These lighter beer types were drunk alongside the darker and also popular beer types such as the Porter and the Stout.
A few years later, around 1972, there was the introduction of a new hop variety called Cascade. In the Oregon region of northwestern America, people had been growing hops for beer production for years. To boost the development of hop varieties, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USDA, established a breeding program for the development of new hop varieties. One of the new hop varieties was Cascade, an offspring of the English Fuggles with the Russian Serebrianker hop. At first, Cascade was not received very enthusiastically. It was brewed but the results were not great, mainly because the flavor was new and brewers were excited to invest in it. This all changed when there brewers at Anchor Brewing Company launched their Liberty IPA in 1975. This beer was brewed in honor of the 200th anniversary of the myth of Paul Revere. This beer caught on with consumers and it wasn't long before other brewers also realized the potential of this hop variety and the new beer style the American Pale Ale. Consumption became more and more and the cascade hop grew into one of the most popular hops among small breweries and amateur breweries.
American Pale Ale in the 21st Century
The number of types of American Pale Ale (APA) is difficult to determine exactly because new beers are constantly being brewed. However, there are hundreds of different APAs available around the world, each with unique flavors and ingredients depending on the brewery and hops used. Major beer databases and websites such as Untappd, RateBeer, and BeerAdvocate have recorded hundreds of different APAs, indicating how popular and diverse this type of beer is.
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