A Quick Blog Post For IPA Day — petebrown.blogspot.com

Being a soldier in India was a life of short periods of extreme violence separated by long stretches of total boredom. The soldiers filled that boredom by drinking.  When Fanny Parkes went India on a ship full of soldiers in 1827, she came to know many of her fellow passengers and was shocked at how quickly many of them died. The average life expectancy of a soldier serving in Calcutta was just three months. Disease was a far bigger killer than combat, and much of it was caused by alcohol.    Beer couldn't be brewed well in India, but a drink known as arak could be made simply by drawing off palm sap and letting it ferment in the hot sun. Arak drinking contests claimed the first European casualties in India when the Dutch and English spice traders got there. One binge could be fatal.  So, in order to keep soldiers alive, they had to be given alcohol that was strong and flavourful, like arak, but not fatal. IPA was strong because if it wasn't, the boozy soldiers would have drunk arak instead.  As for hoppiness? The vivid hop characters we love today would have vanished from the beer after months on a hot ship. But the flavours changed. The locals used to say IPA 'ripened', and when it was ripe, they described it character as being like champagne. My sea-matured IPA certainly had that character to it - somewhere between what we think of as IPA and barley wine.  So - at least some IPA was strong and hoppy. It didn't have to be. It was like that because that's how people wanted it to be, so they drank it instead of the local gut rot. 

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