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.