Big Two Hearted — The Fascinating Story of Bell’s Iconic IPA
The course of the Two Hearted River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula furls and dips like ribbon candy along the coast of Lake Superior, never straying far from its destination, looping through sand bluffs and close pine trees on a bed of stone. Its cold waters are stained the tannic colour of weak tea by the peninsula’s mineral deposits, and house several species of trout that have made it a popular fly fishing destination.
It’s a small stream—a collection of them, initially—for most of its two dozen miles, scribbling its way through high sandbanks in tight curls like the continent’s own asemic writing, before widening and then losing itself in the waters of the largest freshwater lake in the hemisphere.
Photography by David Nilsen
It’s those trout that made the river famous. In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published a two-part story called Big Two Hearted River, in which his proxy Nick Adams fishes the titular stream. It’s broadly accepted now that Hemingway was actually describing the Fox River near Seney in the central Upper Peninsula, but the connection has remained.
I drank my first Bell’s Two Hearted Ale beside a different Upper Peninsula waterway. Since before I was born, my family has camped along the Hurricane River just west of Grand Marais on the coast of Lake Superior, about 35 miles west of the mouth of the Two Hearted. The Hurricane is a shallow stream that tumbles over dark rocks before hitting the beach, and its mouth changes daily as the sands shift with the moods of the big lake.
There’s a small gas station above the harbour in Grand Marais, and it’s one of two places in town you could buy carryout beer when my family visited in the mid-2000s, at a time when I was just beginning to like beer. There was a six-pack of something called an IPA with a trout on the label, and its muted but clear earth tones brought to mind the Hurricane’s bed under a rippled surface.
Back at the campground, I opened my first Two Hearted Ale. It was bitter but clean; bracing like the frigid water of the river on my bare feet. There were notes of the forest—the wind through the high pines and lonely birches clinging to the sandy soil—and bright citrus notes, and more I couldn’t yet identify. It got its hook deep in my heart on that trip, and I still feel the tug.
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Two Hearted Ale has taken its own meandering route to success. In 1995, a young Bell’s brewer named Rob Skalla (who has sadly since passed away) suggested an all-Centennial IPA to founder Larry Bell.
“I think we had some Centennial lying around in-house,” recalls Larry. “For whatever reason, he was just interested in it.”
The story of this little hop that defines so much of the character of Two Hearted Ale is worth telling on its own. As Stan Hieronymus (author of For the Love of Hops) explained to me recently, it shouldn’t even exist.
Hop W415-90 was hybridised in 1974 by hop supplier HopUnion (now known globally as Yakima Chief Hops.) By the mid-80s, the hop was being used by a few small breweries (including Sierra Nevada in Celebration Ale), but not by the larger breweries who had funded its development. The Hops Research Council, the group overseeing this hop program, voted to discontinue W415-90. Ralph Olson, a partner at HopUnion, disagreed.
So Olson decided to act on his own to save the hop that would become Centennial.
“Ralph goes to the farmers growing it and tells them they’re going to keep growing it as an experimental hop. He made up a new name for it,” explains Stan.
As the hop continued to grow in popularity over the coming years, Olson realised he needed to come clean. He went to Steve Kenny at the USDA in Spokane and told him what he’d done. Kenny laughed, and suggested they give the hop a name. That was 1989, the 100th birthday of Washington’s statehood. They called it Centennial.
““To me, this beer is about an expression of raw ingredients shining forth.””
“We’re the largest single purchaser of Centennial hops in the world now,” Larry tells me. “So when we go to the farms, we get first pick.”
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Two Hearted Ale didn’t become a year-round beer at Bell’s until 2004. We have a former wife of Larry Bell’s to thank for that.
“That’s what she asked for as a wedding gift,” he quips.
John Mallett had been brewmaster at Bell’s only a few years when the nuptial request was made. He fine-tuned the production process for Two Hearted, especially for dry hopping and fermentation.
“To me, this beer is about an expression of raw ingredients shining forth,” says John.
While Centennial tends to get the glory, John is quick to paint a fuller picture.
“If you’re going to build this flavour pinnacle, this hop peak, then in the absence of the supporting chorus around it, it’s just going to be this mono-dimensional, uninteresting product. I want this harmonised beer to come through that’s a marriage of great field and farm practice, great malting [and] great brewing.”
Bell’s dry hops the beer during active fermentation, a process now popular for hazy IPAs and prized for the mysterious results of biotransformation.
“The beer has got some characteristics that have always pointed that way,” John says of the transformation of aromatic hop compounds by yeast. “When people started talking about that process a few years ago, we sat in the corner and quietly nodded.”
“I think there’s a whole host of aromas that cross between hops and fermentation,” he elaborates. “There’s a rose-like character from the hops and some esters from the yeast that are synergistic. They’re not that far apart in my flavour brain.”
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When I opened this beer for the first time over a decade ago, I tasted the high pines and the flashy citrus that matched the sun glinting off Lake Superior. But when I think about Two Hearted now, in that first split second, I think about water. Cold water over rock, splashing over shallows, crossing a border of sand, and meeting the waves. There is clean pine and bright orange, yes, but also cool strawberry, and sun-warmed orange blossom. Bitterness vying with sweetness like waves at the shore.
The label for Two Hearted was painted by Michigan artist Ladislav Hanka, who has created numerous Bell’s labels. His father was an early investor in the brewery (the original label for an earlier version of Two Hearted actually featured Hanka’s father), and Bell traded Hanka equity in the company in exchange for his art. His label for Two Hearted Ale that first made me grab it off the shelf is simple and, by modern standards, no longer attention-grabbing. It’s also beautiful, and the perfect visual spirit of this beer: a trout, or part of one—it’s incomplete—with the impression of stone and water.
It’s a haunted image. The trout is a memory, a ghost. It feels ancient. Its colours are muted and misremembered, like a dream. It’s a representation only someone who has spent much time around these waters could create, or recognise. It represents more than it actually depicts, and it evokes the soul of a beer that is clean and simple on its surface but deep and nuanced beneath, meandering endlessly, shifting and changing, but always flowing, like the river that gave it a name.
