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"FacebookPinterestHop2010.png\n\nThink a three-thousand-mile flyover buffer keeps you East Coasters immune from the flannel-clad whims of the Northwest? Not so fast. You wouldn't know IPAs without Willamette-grown Cascades and Chinooks. Newport, Oregon's Rogue brought the maibock back from the brink, and NorCal's Russian River did for American sours what its vintner neighbors did for wine. Like it or not, as goes Portland, so goes your local bar.\n\nThe latest is a new take on the style that put the West Coast on the beer map in the first place. \"We call them Cascadian dark ales,\" says Larry Sidor, brewmaster at Bend's Deschutes brewery. Soon enough, you'll know them as black IPAs.\n\nDeschutes's Hop in the Dark is my favorite. The hops are classic IPA: grapefruity Cascades, Centennials, and Citras. The grains are not: rich, toasted Munichs and crystals, more common in brown ales, porters, and dark lagers. Steeped in cold water and mid with a touch of protein-heavy oats, they give the beer body without any tannic bitterness\u2014the hops bring enough bite on their own.\n\nSidor has been making beer for 35 years, but he started in the wine world, developing yeast strains at Oregon State back when Napa was just a valley. Seven years in the hops industry means he knows his Citras from his Simcoes (Deschutes is one of the few breweries to use almost exclusively uncrushed, whole flower hops). But it still took 23 batches to perfect Hop in the Dark's tenuous balance of malt and citrus.\n\nBrewers darken light beers all the time. Jolly Pumpkin's instant classic Bam Noire is a kind of black saison; Great Divide and Troegs are both experimenting with wood-aged IPAs. But Hop in the Dark is special because it makes a tough play seem simple\u2014or better, destined. Black IPAs are here, and it's about time: try Stone's Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale, and coming this August, Pyramid's Discord Dark IPA. Will the style stick? When Sidor started at Deschutes, it was a classic British brewery with a classic British pale. His first pass at an all-American IPA flopped. \"The locals hated it,\" he said. \"Now we have the best-selling IPA in the Northwest.\"\n\nFor more beer reviews, and news of my cross-country brewery tour, follow @beercraftbook."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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