India Pale Ale (IPA)

Simply put, it’s lighter in appearance than other beers (especially the popular porters), and the British shipped a lot of it to India during the 1800s. The presence of lots of hops allowed the beer to survived the six-month trip trip to India relatively unscathed, unlike the heavier beers popular in London during the time.

Why I Looked It Up

I ordered an IPA after a pilsner, and noticed how much lighter it appeared. This explained the “pale” part of the name. But then I got to wondering about the “India” part.

At the same time I was reading The Covenant by James Michener about trade between Europe and the Far East, so I had spent a lot of time reading about the big “East Indiamen” ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope. I finally looked it up.

Postscript

An article in CNN calls this entire thing into question: What is an IPA? A deliciously happy accident of beer history or the colonial marketing of a frugal recipe?

While the beer shares a history with India and the British Empire, the IPA moniker owes more to national pride and business savvy than ingenuity.

Credit for popularizing the pale ales sent to India goes to a brewer named George Hodgson, who invented a hoppy ale he named after himself. […]

Hodgson had an exclusive beer contract with the British East India Company. He supplied the company – which in turn supplied India’s British – with Brown ales, porters and his October Beer, a “stronger, hoppier and more bitter cousin of the regular pale ale,” […]

In the 1820s and ‘30s, Hodgson’s competitors gave the October Beer style a new name, India Pale Ale, merely to evoke their patrons’ sense of imperialist pride.