Hazy-O! — a new Hazy IPA made with oat milk instead of lactose from Dogfish Head — has opened up a new consumer base to market to and the Delaware-based brewery is using it to create what founder Sam Calagione calls “white space” in the veteran company’s portfolio.
“Hazy-O! is a great, vegan-friendly addition to our lineup of active lifestyle-centric beers,” he said. The brewery has most recently gained prominence for exploring “healthier-for-you” beers like the low-calorie Slightly Mighty IPA and SeaQuench Ale, a sessionable Sour.
“At Dogfish, we are proponents of leading active lifestyles that include both exercise and indulgence, and we are committed to crafting beers that fit that worldview,” Calagione said. “With Hazy-O!, we were able to create a true hazy IPA that can appeal to many different audiences – craft beer geeks, wellness-conscience consumers, and drinkers seeking both lactose-free and vegan options.”
Hazy-O! took almost a year of R&D to perfect, the brewery explained in its press release. Dogfish Head enlisted the help of oat milk scientists from Elmhurst 1925, a family-owned, plant-based milk producer out of New York. Calagione told Brewer that at least eight different R&A test batches were created to find the ratio of moving from lactose to oat milk.
“We like to keep our off-centered innovation and production processes pretty close to our vest,” he said. “But … we tweaked different variables, including volume per barrel of oat milk added. The batch we rolled out with strikes the perfect balance of all inputs.”
Although Hazy-O! is the first nationally distributed oat milk-centric hazy IPA, it’s not the first despite the claim that “there really aren’t many – if any – beers for us to compare it to,” Calagione told Brewer.
Baltimore’s DuClaw announced a limited run of an oat milk IPA through its 19-state territory more than a year ago with Oatshake, a Hazy Double IPA.
READ MORE: No Oats About it, DuClaw Explores Vegan Options
But Calagione said Dogfish head sees tremendous growth of both Hazy IPAs and oat milk, so offering a product at the crux of these two explosive trends seems like the perfect idea for a new, national beer release.
“The Hazy IPA is the fastest-growing beer style in America, up almost 80%*, and oat milk’s sales were up over 220%** in 2020,” he said. “Dogfish is pioneering a new white space in the sweet spot between these two trends.”
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