Malt & Grain

A West Coast IPA is a pale beer with little sweetness, and that starts with the malt. The base is pale barley malt. Malt is barley that's been steeped in water to germinate and then dried in a kiln, a heated drying chamber, to stop germination while preserving the sugars needed for fermentation.

In the BJCP style guidelines, the US competition handbook, an American IPA falls between 12 and 28 EBC. This is the brewer's color scale, ranging here from golden yellow to copper. Copper hues come from a small proportion of caramel malt, which adds body. In the classic West Coast version, this proportion stays small so the hops aren't masked.

Some brewers add a bit of sugar to the wort — the boiled malt solution — before fermentation. The yeast converts it entirely into alcohol, making the beer drier and leaner. In strong beers like Double IPA, this helps push up the alcohol content without making the beer cloying.

San Diego isn't barley country. Malt is bought in, and breweries work with delivered sacks or silos. Only a handful of very small operations run their own maltings. Brewing in Escondido or along the coast means ordering malt the way a baker orders flour: by variety, color, and quantity, from a supplier who tests and packages each batch.

Darker malts show up mainly in glasses of Lost Abbey. The San Marcos brewery takes its cues from Belgian abbey beers, brewing Dubbels, Tripels, and Dark Strong Ales with heavier malts, sometimes with candi sugar. So the counterpoint to the dry IPA lies within the very same county.