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Recipe Development Series: West Coast IPAs

Broadcast Date: August 7, 2025 | 1:00pm - 2:00pm CDT
Price: FREE for members, $49 for nonmembers

Webinar Summary

In this seminar, we will discuss current trends in the design and brewing of West Coast India Pale Ale. Topics will include the evolution of IPA recipes over the past 15 years; the emergence of contemporary West Coast IPA as a distinctive style from traditional and modern American IPA; the use of advanced and novel hop products in these beers; organoleptic and quantitative approaches to bitterness; hop creep and diacetyl management; hop aroma stability; and yield optimization when dealing with heavy dry hop loads.

Learning Objectives

Understand the contours of the emergent West Coast IPA style and how it is distinct from and connected to more traditional American IPA.
Have a firm grasp of the major compositional and material considerations for the development and production of new IPAs for the commercial marketplace

Webinar Presenter

Ben Edmunds

Breakside Brewery

Ben is the brewmaster at Breakside Brewery in Portland, Oregon, where he oversees the company's production brewery and two pub breweries. As founding brewer of Breakside, he helped grow the company from a small brewpub into a successful regional brewery producing over 7 million pints of beer per year. Under Ben's leadership, Breakside has won many medals at national and international competitions, including 16 World Beer Cup awards and 29 Great American Beer Festival medals since 2011, as well as Brewery of the Year honors at the Oregon Beer Awards in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Educated at the Siebel Institute and Yale University, he is also a longtime board member and former president of the Oregon Brewers Guild, and a judge at the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup. In 2023, Ben received the Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Brewing from the Brewers Association, one of the most prestigious awards in the beer industry.