Traditionally it was made to a higher bitterness as hops are like an anticeptic mesure in beer. More bitterness ment less spoilt beer. It needed this for the long trip from england to India on the ships. All the rock and roll on the boat tended to stir it up and hence caused higher attenuation of the beer on the trip.
Hence the higher alc and bitterness................. i doubt they dry hopped back then....... traditionally.
AIPA........... yeah the yanks like to over do everything, hops will be the same so they dry hop.
I cant say the poms didnt dry hop way back when the beer was being carted to india but hey...... can you see them opening barels on a ship and slipping hops in to it?
cheers
I wasn't alive at the time so I can't say for sure. Can only go from my reading.
Great British beers and How to Brew Them suggests that quite a few beers (not just IPAs) were originally very high gravity, very highly hopped, aged for a long time (as in 10-12 months+) then dry hopped for freshness. Presumably the high hopping helped preserve them but the bitterness integrated with the ageing.
Dry hopping is common to some beers traditionally (again from my reading - I'm only 35 so exactly what happened in 1876 I'm not sure of) - I've read of saisons and alts being dry hopped although not commonly.
I think because the American grown hops are so high aa and so in your face and because they are always trying to build one better/bigger that we associate a lot of those techniques with them but they didn't invent them. They just resurrected them and made them MASSIVE!!
All this is interpretation of someone else's interpretation of history of course and in general - while I've tried some very tasty US beers and while I think that their spearheading of the craftbrew market is great - I like a lot of single hopped, balanced type beers like English Bitters, German alts, bocks and dunkels and so on. I don't think every beer has to be high octane hop soup to be wonderful - even hoppy beers don't have to punch me in the tit to remind me I'm drinking them.
Any idiot can throw tons of hops at something and hope that extremity justifies/covers up any other faults just as any fool can mash with 3 kg of crytsal and pretend the resulting cloy- sump is even remotely drinkable.
Judicious use of loads of hops OR loads of malt or both together can result in marvels my tongue needs a bit more of.
Last thing I want to do is quote brewing text at someone when I have no specific experience (speaking historicallly) of it by the way but my experience of some current commercial UK styles suggests hoppiness and dry hopping are not unique to the US - just more subtly carried out.
