Since noticing a reference to modern hazy IPA in the New York Times crossword,¹ and wondering what that “meant” in terms of beer’s currency in the popular culture, I’ve been keeping a tally of what else comes up. I recently realised I had a full calendar year worth of such records, and the urge to make a spreadsheet and go looking for patterns came on predictably strongly (for me) after that. The result: ninety-nine appearances, clumped around a few themes, with ale and ipa done to death, a few favoured brand names, some real clangers, and the occasional delight.

I think I got all the beer-related clues and answers. There were a few marginal calls; I skipped oast (‘Kiln for hops’, which appeared twice) on the grounds it’s more of an agricultural term than strictly brewing-related one, and likewise didn’t include wider bar or drinking references that weren’t specific to beer. I also haven’t counted a few clever misdirects, like when ‘Brewers’ implement’ meant baseballbat — as in the Milwaukee Brewers. So let’s call it 99, and here they all are:²

10 are ale and 8 are ipa, and if you include their plurals then together they make up more than a quarter of the whole set. The way American-style crosswords are constructed,³ they need a lot of shortish words as “fill”, so those — with their two vowels and pretty-common consonants — are real utility-words. They’re not quite as overused as ode and ssn, or aloe and oreo, but they’re in danger of getting close. So there’s a real need to keep the clues fresh, and I think ale is struggling on that front, while ipa at least now has nuances like “hazy” and “double dry-hopped” (making its debut in June) to add some variety.

sourbeers also made their first appearance in the Times puzzle in 2024 (as ‘Pucker precipitators at a pub’),⁴ which feels a bit late in zeitgeist-monitoring terms; I’d have thought they were fair game long before, but no one seems to have referenced them earlier. And hazyipa graduated to being an answer in its own right, not just part of a clue, further cementing this particular sense of it being “a thing”.

That creamale clue in the header image (‘Bar order that’s dairy-free, despite its name’) struck me as pretty tricky but fun and gettable, and I initially thought bock was really difficult and obscure (it also appears as part of the clue for lager) but it seems like the word has much more currency here in the U.S. than back home, with loads of historical examples and a few currently on the market.⁵

In the brand-recognition stakes, asahi narrowly beats pabst, 5 to 4, its more-useful combination of letters probably winning out over national pride. A few others — Sierra Nevada, Voodoo Ranger, Amstel, Peroni, Corona — appear once or twice each as either clues or answers, with samadams apparently versatile enough to be both. odouls (‘Nonalcoholic beer brand’) was the only one I’d never heard of, so if something is widely-known enough for inclusion in the NYT, it’s likely also reached the awareness of a relatively plugged-in Antipodean — though your mileage may vary on the two servings of ‘Michelob ___’ (ultra), and budice, with its long-winded clue referencing ads from thirty years ago.

‘Pricey flight options, perhaps’ (craftbeers) was one of my favourite clues of the whole year, and ‘Noise at a beer festival’ (glug) just absolutely sucks. There is, I mean to say, a real range in quality on display here. The bulk are fine, my enjoyment mostly coming from appreciating the reference rather than the clue itself. But nitpicking is itself a source of fun,⁶ so: alekeg and aletap are clunky and unnatural; a keg isn’t a “dispenser” on its own; pils probably doesn’t need the “informal” or “casual” qualifiers; and the “black and tan” reference is a big yikes, as is the continued use of ‘Imperial ___’ (ipa) — though that one’s on us, as an industry.

Meanwhile malt isn’t quite right for ‘Grain used in beer making’,⁷ ‘Strong draft’ for stout and ‘Brews made with heavily roasted malt’ for darkales both get an emphatic not necessarily from me, and ale as the solution for ‘Hefeweizen, e.g.’ annoys me even more, for reasons almost too pedantic to explain.⁸

Looking at the actual constructors of the crosswords themselves, there’s a few repeat names responsible for beer-themed stuff, but it’s not like one rogue geek is doing all the heavy lifting.⁹  That initial thought I had that its frequent use in the puzzle pages was a nice signifier of how beer (and certain things within beer — like Hazy IPA, now) is just part of the cultural background seems borne out by its spread.

The NYT crossword traditionally gets harder through the week, and then finishes with a bigger grid on Sunday, reverting to about “average” difficulty. So maybe there’s a slight sense in the data that a beer reference can make for an “easy” answer — but it’s weak, and you can always clue the same word more or less obtusely; look at the different roads taken to get to pabst in the table above, for example.

The patterns through the year are stronger, and more mysterious. That lull in August-September is striking — just five beer references, most of them pretty dire.¹⁰ Maybe there’s something in the thought that a puzzle takes a few months to go through the pipeline, so there’s a lag between good beer-drinking weather and that increased inspiration actually making it to print. But now we’re into too much speculation from a small dataset even for me, so that’ll do for now.

1. I don’t feel great about having a paid subscription to their puzzles section, given how comprehensively their newsroom has been failing to meet the moment. Maybe I should ditch it for something else, but you make your own mix of choices and for me they’re (just) on the side of doing badly rather than doing bad.
2. With thanks, as always, to the brilliantly simple and reliable TablePress plugin.
3. Every letter appears in two words, which is what gives them their radically-different layout and vastly more clues per puzzle — and why I’m not 100% certain I caught all the beer in 2024; it’s possible to fill out a word purely from its intersecting answers and never see its clue.
4. When I saw it, I added it as a postscript to my initial Hazy-IPA-hits-the-NYT piece, so I think I really have needed to get this post out of my system for a while.
5. See, for example: a bajillion posts on Brookston Beer Bulletin, or the relative ubiquity of Shiner Bock — or the fact I was recently at a beer launch for one that was simultaneously old and new.
6. I often find myself saying “well, that was terrible” as the victory jingle plays, and always enjoy reading Rex Parker’s take when I’m done.
7. You use malted grain (of various kinds), and indeed some unmalted stuff sometimes. Malting is a process; you cannot have a field of malt.
8. I’ve re-drafted this footnote countless times to try. It’s basically a category error, casually mixing up different taxonomies of beer in a way that causes all sorts of confusion elsewhere but is arguably kind of fine in this particular case I guess.
9. Indeed — and I’m not going to table these or name names, because this is one sample and I’m a beer critic, not a crossword one — there’s a bit of a correlation between more beer content from an author and it being at the shallower end. One relied almost entirely on brand names, another only ever used ale or ipa. The really good clues tended to come out of the blue.
10. Which I take personally, since my birthday is right in the middle of that period.