Good People IPA — Alabama’s Best-Selling IPA Is Also Its Most Honest

The Review

There’s a certain kind of confidence in calling your flagship beer simply IPA. No subtitle, no clever name, no regional mythology attached. Just IPA. It says: the beer is the point. Judge us on that.

Good People has been making this argument since 2008, when Jason Malone and Michael Sellers opened Birmingham’s first craft brewery in a city that didn’t yet have a craft beer scene worth mentioning. Alabama’s Prohibition-era ABV laws had just been reformed thanks to the Free the Hops lobby, and Good People was ready. They opened, they poured, and Birmingham drank.

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The IPA pours a clear, burnished copper with a white head that holds. The nose is citrus-forward with an earthy, herbal underpinning — classic American hop character, nothing tropical, nothing trying to be something it isn’t. On the palate: dry-hopped bitterness up front, a caramel malt middle that keeps things from going thin, and a clean dry finish that begs another sip.

At 7.1% it’s not a session beer, but it drinks like one. The unfiltered character gives it a slight haze and a fullness that makes it feel more substantial than the IBU count suggests. Michael Sellers has said his favorite beer is the Pale Ale — but the IPA is the one that built Good People’s reputation, and it wears that history honestly.

There are flashier beers in Birmingham now. There are NEIPAs and barrel-aged sours and double dry-hopped everything. But when you want to know what a brewery is really made of, you drink the IPA. And Good People’s is still the best argument in town.

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