Houston beer lovers toast Parish Brewing Co.'s ode to its superstar

quote:

---

During a tough year in craft beer, when breweries are closing and growth has stalled, there remain signs that people still crave delicious, independently made brews. Look no further than the shelves at certain Houston's Specs and Total Wine & More locations, where over the last few days one ghostly beer has come and gone like a thief in the night.

Parish Brewing Co. out of Broussard, La., had beer lovers rushing to the store this week for Infinite Ghost, a one-time double-dry-hopped IPA to celebrate 10 years of its most famous beer, Ghost in the Machine.

"It's hard to get people excited about beer nowadays. There are a lot of breweries, a lot of great products from breweries. Inflation is a problem, and when your dollar is not going as far as it used to, you're less excited about going out and searching for beers," Parish Brewing Co. owner Andrew Godley told Chron. "So we're just really glad to see [the results of] the decisions that we were making, how we're making our beers, what we're choosing to put out there in the market."

The reaction to a single beer is a testament to the success of its cousin beer. Ghost in the Machine is like an IPA, but with approximately double the hops. Some of those hops are added during the boiling process early in brewing, while others are added as the beer ferments—a practice called "dry hopping." Many of those hops are Citra, a popular variety of hop from Yakima Valley Hops in Washington, which in beer imparts citrus notes. It's the key hop in juicy IPAs nationwide, and many would say Parish uses it to perfection in Ghost, whose story starts in 2013.

Back then, a not heavily distributed double IPA called Heady Topper by The Alchemist, a small brewpub in northwestern Vermont, was named the top beer in the world by readers of the beer bible Beer Advocate. Because the hard-to-procure Heady Topper carried a juicier, more accessible flavor despite its stronger hop recipe—especially compared to more bitter West Coast-rooted IPAs of the time—its emergence marked the beginning of a sea change in craft beer.

Around the same time, Godley and his Parish staff members were sitting around their four-year-old taproom, pouring all kinds of bottles from all kinds of breweries. Godley wasn't sure yet what Parish was supposed to be, what kind of mark it might make in craft beer, so maybe he'd find inspiration in other places. Heady Topper was among the beers sampled, and he noticed staff was finishing full pours of it.

"It was a light bulb moment for me," Godley said. "People prefer a double IPA that was really juicy and hoppy but not bitter at all. That's how Heady Topper was different from everything in the style."

Fully inspired, the Parish team got to work, and the result was Ghost in the Machine. Born in 2014, Ghost is part of the first wave of the hazy IPA movement. While breweries up in the northeast, including The Alchemist, Treehouse and Trillium in Massachusetts and Sloop in New York were setting the tone for what would first be called the "New England IPA," Parish had been doing their own version, calling it "hazy" and "juicy."
However you label it, Ghost is one of the highest-rated beers in the hazy IPA style and arguably the best of its kind south of the Mason-Dixon Line, if not nationwide. It's also massively popular in southeast Texas, where Parish has been distributing since 2018.

That's what paved the way for Infinite Ghost, which is Ghost in the Machine but with double the dry-hopped Citra plus Citra terpenes, or compounds extracted from hops that add massive hits of aroma. Reaction on Houston beer lover Facebook pages was swift, with users posting photos of their haul from local stores within a day of release.

It's unusual in 2024 for a single beer release to generate that much excitement. We're far from the days when lines would snake out the door because folks were waiting for a 10:30 a.m. drop of some cake-flavored imperial stout. But Parish hit on something unique, thanks to years of consistency and earned trust. Godley thinks this may just be the beginning of more Ghost-inspired celebrations.

---