Jazy like the rapper Jay Z and not like jazzy without a Z.
A couple years before we opened Nate and Chris sat down for lunch to talk about things with this brewery. It took Nate a pint before he had the courage to broach the subject with Chris, who would have to brew the thing, that we would need to offer a Hazy IPA.
Hazy IPA is the moniker for New England IPA, which are turbid, or cloudy, by design, and feature the aromatic properties of the hops that are used, as opposed to traditional IPAs that once promoted the bittering nature of hops. The water is also “soft” from a dissolved solids standpoint. Some may argue that these soft, cloudy, fruit-forward beers are not IPAs but another style all to themselves, but that is not for us to decide. I digress.
When we started brewing New England IPAs, we used a 2.0, 4.5, 5.3, etc as a numerical indicator so that you would be able to discern that it was the same or different beer from your last visit. We did this because Chris’ mind works numerically like this. He would change the digit to the left of the decimal when a big change to the water, malt, yeast had occurred and changed the number to the right of the decimal when the hops changed.
Now this was all well and good until Chris had to make a move. We’re extremely fortunate to have our new brewer, Josh, with us. However, he was even farther behind the hazy train than Chris was, so when his first batch of Hazy went on, it didn’t stay cloudy. We did what any front-of-house staff would do, we poked fun at him. Then Josh doomed us all by suggesting that we name them Jazy for Juicy Hazy…
That worked for us as we could now name them Jazy IPAs with a Jay Z song to differentiate from each version. So far we have had Jazy IPA, Jazy ‘99 Problems’ IPA, and Jazy ‘Friend or Foe’ IPA. What will we come up with next?