Definitive Tier List of MA Breweries (IPA edition)
There are a ton of great breweries in Massachusetts, but some are more great than others
I’m a big fan of tier lists. They’re fun to make, and they get the people going. Importantly, it’s a clear way to visualize how we might stack rank a set of items against each other on some axis. In this case, I’m stack ranking Massachusetts-based taproom breweries by quality of their IPA offerings.
A couple notes on selection criteria and methodology:
Similar to my last post, I pulled the top 25 beers from Untappd for every single MA taproom brewery. I removed production & contract breweries (included Sam Adams / Boston Beer & Harpoon) as well as brewpubs and pilot breweries, to leave me with the remaining regional/micro/nano breweries and taprooms.
I filtered down to all Pale Ales & IPAs, and found a strong regression relationship between ABV and Untappd Rating.
For every IPA, I looked at how far above or below the trendline that beer was. How much better or worse the rating was versus the expected rating given the ABV.
For every brewery, I took the average “rating delta” across all their IPAs. Then I ranked them all.
To filter down the list of ~100 taproom breweries to something more manageable, I only looked at breweries that had 140+ or so monthly checkins or more on Untappd. This brought my list down to a more manageable 31 breweries.
This gave me a somewhat objective list of which breweries consistently earn higher ratings for their IPAs on Untappd than we’d expect given the ABV of the beers they’re making.
However, Untappd isn’t itself unbiased. In some situations, a decent tasting beer that is much cheaper may get better ratings if people feel it is better value. Some really small breweries may over-index on ratings from more critical enthusiasts who go out of their way to rate those beers. Or maybe a brewery changed ownership over the past few years and older Untappd ratings may no longer represent their current quality.
To supplement the “somewhat objective” data from Untappd, I’ve made a few manual adjustments based on my own experiences and opinions drinking IPAs from these breweries. The most notable example: I brought Nightshift Brewing down 1-2 tiers from what their Untappd ratings would indicate. There’s a good objective reason for this and a subjective reason for this. The objective reason: Nightshift underwent a transformational change a few years ago when they shut down their Everett location and are fully contract brewing with Jack’s Abbey. Because of this, their overall selection and variety has declined significantly. They only produce a few beers now. As a result, many of the IPAs on their “most popular all time” list on Untappd (where my data source comes from) are no longer produced. Subjectively, I think their IPAs that they currently produce are entirely mid. The best beer they make on a relative basis, IMO, is Whirlpool Pale Ale. Untappd agrees. But at 4.5% it really is more crushable slightly hoppy ale than IPA. As a result, I’m penalizing them for being unable to produce anything I’d really consider a strong IPA candidate. Plus I’m mad at them for shutting down and giving up on their Everett team and location.
Okay, Night Shift rant over. Time for the Tier List:
Update: This is ALL IPAs, I reran below for Hazy IPAs only
Before looking at any data, my clear and obvious take was that Tree House, Trillium, and Vitamin Sea made by far the best IPAs in the state. However, over the past year, I’ve had quite a few different Hazies from Long Live Beerworks, and all of them have been absolute bangers. Long Live was founded in 2016 in Rhode Island, but only in 2023 did they open a Boston taproom and begin distributing up here more readily.
There’s a case honestly to put VSB and LL together with Tree House and Trillium in the SS tier, but for the sake of historical importance in the craft beer scene, and for their work creating the modern hazy IPA (as well as the quality of their best beers), I feel it’s necessary to put Tree House and Trillium in a league of their own. They are absolute legends, and they have continued pushing the boundaries of what IPAs can (and should) be.
Some honorable mentions that did not make the selection, but scored highly: Little Willow, Vanished Valley, Bright Ideas, and Great Awakening. Little Willow missed out due to not having a taproom, and being classified as a “Contract Brewery”, but would have been the 3rd brewery in S tier behind VSB and LL. The other three breweries would have slotted into the A tier, but were left out due to being smaller (fewer than 100 monthly check ins on Untappd). Unfortunately if I included all such small breweries across the state, the rest of the tiers would be overflowing. That said, I’ve never had an IPA from these three smaller breweries, so may have to go out of my way to find some.
Let me know what I got wrong, or who I’m under-estimating when it comes to IPAs. Maybe I’ll need to give some of these breweries a second chance, or maybe my name-lookup script missed an important one. But for now, this is the definitely definitive and not at all biased tier list of Massachusetts breweries by IPA quality.
1/23 Update:
After sharing this with some fellow beer enthusiasts, I came to a couple conclusions:
I need to include Little Willow, who makes consistently excellent Hazy IPAs (despite not having either a brewery / taproom OR a website!)
I need to filter out West Coast IPAs and Pale Ales and really focus on Hazy IPAs, since the Untappd ratings tend to be extremely skewed by these style differences.
Note the trendline for Hazy IPAs is nearly +0.20 points higher for Hazy IPAs than non-Hazy IPAs. This is a meaningful and large delta. The difference between a more elite brewery and a mediocre one.
As a result, the original IPA chart is unfairly punishing breweries that maybe brew more West Coast IPAs or American IPAs, which would get lower Untappd ratings than a brewery that only produced Hazy IPAs.
To fix this (and to answer the question I really care about as a Hazy IPA enthusiast) I re-ran the same analysis filtering down all breweries with 10+ Hazy IPAs in their top 25 most sold beers, ranking them solely based on their average Hazy IPA performance relative to other Hazy IPAs. I lowered the minimum monthly check-ins requirement to 75+, catching some smaller breweries that specialize in Hazies and getting us back to 29 total breweries in the list. It’s the All-Hazy Tier List.
Notable changes from the All-IPA List:
Several B tier breweries moved down to C tier as smaller Hazy IPA specialists filled in their places and put pressure on them. Notably the popular Exhibit A, Greater Good, Bentwater and Medusa all moved down 1 tier each, in addition to a few others.
After conversations with others in the Mass Craft Beer Facebook Group, I feel pretty good that this is a solid reflection of the overall quality of Hazy IPA breweries in the state, at least among a reasonable-to-rank set of them.
As always, let me know where you disagree!