Ipa why india

Outward bound, ships carried supplies for the army, who paid well enough for a taste of home, and particularly for beer, but the East India Company EIC made all its profit on the return trip, when its clippers rode low in the water, holds weighed with skeins of Chinese silk and sacks of cloves. The trip to India took at least six months, crossing the equator twice. In these thousand-ton ships, called East Indiaman, the hold was a hellish cave, hazy with heat and packed gunwale to gunwale with crates and barrels that pitched and rolled and strained their ropes with every wave.

While sailors sick from scurvy groaned above, the beer below fared just as poorly. It often arrived stale, infected, or worse, not at all, the barrels having leaked or broken — or been drunk — en route. Hodgson sold his beer on month credit, which meant the EIC could wait to pay for it until their ships returned from India, emptied their holds, and refilled the company's purses.

Still, the army, and thus the EIC, was frustrated with the quality Hodgson was providing. Hodgson tried unfermented beer, adding yeast once it arrived safely in port. They tried beer concentrate, diluting it on shore. Nothing worked. Nothing, that is, until Hodgson offered, instead of porter, a few casks of a strong, pale beer called barleywine or "October beer.

Some lords brewed a batch to honor a first son's birth, and tapped it when the child turned eighteen. To keep them tasting fresh, they were loaded with just-picked hops. Hodgson figured a beer that sturdy could withstand the passage to India. He was right. His shipment arrived to fanfare. On a balmy January day in , the Calcutta Gazette announced the unloading of "Hodgson's warranted prime picked ale of the genuine October brewing. Fully equal, if not superior, to any ever before received in the settlement.

The praise turned Hodgson's sons Mark and Frederick, who took over the brewery from their father soon after, ruthless. In the years to come, if they heard that another brewer was preparing a shipment, they'd flood the market to drive down prices and scare off the competition.

They tightened their credit limits and hiked up their prices, eventually dumping the EIC altogether and shipping beer to India themselves. The suits downriver were not amused. He stormed into Bow's rival Allsopp with a bottle of Hodgson's October beer and asked for a replica. Allsopp was good at making porter — dark, sweet, and strong, the way the Russians liked it. When Sam Allsopp tried the sample of Hodgson's beer Marjoribanks had brought, he spit it out — too bitter for the old man's palate.

Still, India was an open market. Allsopp agreed to try a pale. He asked his maltster, Job Goodhead, to find the lightest, finest, freshest barley he could. The beer that barley made was something special too: "a heavenly compound," one satisfied drinker reported.

IPAs were high class. To solve this issue, the British brewers used two tricks they knew worked for preserving, the first being alcohol, and the second being hops, which we learned about earlier. There is way more information there than you could ever hope to know about the IPA. There are many, many more, but those are some of the best.

There you have it. Well, this highly hopped beer has a long and fascinating history:. Back in the late 18th century, English brewing companies realised adding extra hops to their pale ales would save the brews on the hot voyage around Africa. It was too hot to brew in India at the time, and with the water being mostly undrinkable, there was a huge demand for beer by the English colonists.

The eagle-eyed may notice modern beers use the acronym — IPA — rather than I.