312: Pure Project’s Winslow Sawyer Brews With Style, Not to Style
Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast
How to Make a Murky IPA
"We were trying these beers and we're like, this is such a cool expression of hops. This is such a different thing," he says. "It was really fun and interesting process to go through because there were very few people that we could talk to about process" He adds: "What yeast you choose is going to really determine what your hazy IPA is like"
When Winslow Sawyer and his partners launched San Diego’s Pure Project in the middle of the last decade, they weren’t focused on brewing particular styles. Instead, they began with the tenet of building a brewery focused on sustainability, using natural ingredients from small farmers wherever possible, and lowering their environmental impact while also giving back through the 1% for the Planet program.
IPA wasn’t the initial focus—San Diego already had plenty of great IPAs—but as the hazy IPA trend caught on Sawyer quickly found a way to explore his love of New Zealand hops despite the constraint Pure Project placed on themselves—no reverse osmosis, only municipal water built up, not stripped down. Now, they don’t define their hazy IPAs as “New England-style,” but have coined the term “murky” instead.
In this episode, Sawyer discusses their approach to a range of beers, from IPA to pale lager and even spontaneously fermented acid-forward beer. Along the way, he covers:
- consciously choosing single infusion over decoction in their pale lager
- balancing flavor intensity with drinkability
- altering their approach to hoppy beers over the past number of years
- using Mosaic as a base for experimentation with new hops
- reducing dankness as beers increase in ABV
- brewing spontaneous beers with wet hops
And more.
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