If your mental image of an IPA is "aggressively bitter," the hazy IPA is here to fix that.
The style comes from New England, where brewers in the 2010s started asking a heretical question: what if an IPA was about hop flavor instead of hop bitterness? Hops added late in the boil — or after it, in what brewers call dry hopping — contribute almost no bitterness. What they contribute instead is aroma and flavor: mango, passionfruit, citrus, pine.
The haze itself is not dirt or yeast floating around. It is a colloid of proteins from oats and wheat bound with hop polyphenols, held in suspension. Those same oats and wheat give the beer a soft, pillowy body that makes it drink more like juice than like a bitter classic IPA. Hence the nickname: juice bomb.
SOMA IPA is our version, and it is the hardest beer we make. Here is why: alcohol carries flavor, so when you remove it, a thin beer tastes like sparkling barley water. The haze construction — oats, wheat, protein, all that suspended body — is what lets a non-alcoholic version still feel like a real IPA in your mouth.
We brew it full-strength with Citra and Mosaic hops, the two varieties responsible for the tropical character in most of the world's favorite hazies. Citra brings grapefruit and lime; Mosaic brings mango and blueberry. Then we pull the alcohol out with vacuum distillation at low temperature, which matters enormously here — high heat would cook off exactly the delicate hop aromatics that define the style. We finish with a second dry hop after dealcoholization, so the aroma you smell is the aroma we canned.
The result pours hazy gold with a dense white head, smells like a fruit stand, and finishes soft with barely-there bitterness. 65 calories. Under 0.5% ABV.
If you have a craft-beer friend who says NA beer cannot be good, hand them the IPA and say nothing. It is more persuasive than we are.