Pale Ale

“The aim here is to make a ripping XPA that combines plenty of saturated modern hop characters—thanks in part to the multiple small kettle-hop additions—with a lean but structured malt base,” says Scotty Hargrave, the progenitor of modern XPA.

Lean, dry, and highly drinkable—but with the full-spectrum hop punch of an IPA—the extra pale ale is engineered for volume, for warm weather… and for thirsty brewers ready to hone their technique.

Cannonball Creek cofounder and brewer Brian Hutchinson explains why they’re looking for the leanest, palest base malts for their award-winning West Coast–Style IPAs—and how hop creep plays an intentional role in their low finishing gravities.

Brian Hutchinson, cofounder and brewer at the Colorado brewpub that’s won a slew of medals for its hop-forward beers over the past 13 years, details their approach to achieving high-impact flavor and quality at small scale.

This colonial-era pale ale recipe—a collaboration with Mount Vernon to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—takes a page right out of Martha Washington’s cookbook.

Missouri’s first Black-owned brewery, Kansas City’s Vine Street, released this light, hoppy, fonio-focused riff on the Black Is Beautiful open-source collab in 2025.

Malt-forward yet light and highly drinkable, this Scottish-style session ale is also straightforward to brew.

The Scottish heavy—also known as the 70-shilling ale—isn’t so heavy at all. Typically below 4 percent ABV, it punches well above its weight in flavor.

From Offset Bier in Park City, Utah, this session-strength IPA—which features the new public hop, Vera—is fresh off a gold-medal win at the Great American Beer Festival.

This extra pale ale is a crowd favorite at Craft Coast Beer & Tacos in San Diego’s North County. It’s also found success at the highest levels of competition, winning two straight World Beer Cup medals—bronze in 2024, then silver in 2025.

Here’s how homebrewers can punch up their pale ales with the bright flavors of New Zealand hops. Plus: a method for getting a whirlpool-like flavor burst without having to whirl anything.

From Shawn Cooper and Joran Van Gingerachter of Atlanta’s Halfway Crooks, here’s a recipe for their own “brewer’s beer”—a dry, bitter, quenching pale ale packed with Belgian-grown hops and accentuated by careful yeast expression.

With a gluten-free grist of 100 percent rice malt, this homebrew recipe comes from Jim Eckert, the rice-malting pioneer who founded Eckert Malting & Brewing in Chico, California.

Writer David Jesudason and brewer Nidhi Sharma share this homebrew-scale recipe based on an Indian-spiced pale ale they brewed together at London’s Meantime. It features “luminescent” turmeric as well as coriander, bay leaves, and black pepper.

From the historic heart of Amsterdam, De Bekeerde Suster brewer Jason Pellett shares this recipe for a hop-forward pale ale that makes use of cacao’s fruity pulp (and a few of the nibs).

From Marble Beers in Manchester, England, here’s what head of production Joe Ince describes as “a lighter, hoppier bitter, northern in style.”

Today’s British brewers are melding traditional cask bitter with brighter, modern hopping for a crushable alchemy greater than the sum of its parts. Will the rest of us ever catch on?

Malt extract and hop extract join hands for this American pale ale recipe, which gets some aromatic bang from a potent cold-side addition.

From Cervecería Hércules in Santiago de Querétaro, here’s a taste of summer from Mexico featuring a global blend of American, British, German, and New Zealand hops.