Saint Arnold Brewing Company's Elissa IPA, the Houston brewery's very first IPA and a fixture on store shelves since 2004, is headed for retirement. Co-founder and owner Brock Wagner has confirmed the beer is on its way out, even as the current batch — the last one — sits fermenting at the brewery.
Wagner told Chron that Elissa IPA has not technically been retired yet and will remain available in stores through the first quarter of 2027. But he confirmed the plan to phase it out, telling the outlet that customers themselves are effectively the ones determining its fate. Saint Arnold, now a 32-year-old Houston craft brewery, debuted Elissa IPA in March 2004, according to the Saint Arnold Brewing Company website, which describes it as a malt-forward beer brewed with British Maris Otter malt and a single hop variety, Cascade.
A Beer Built Around a Tall Ship's Story
Elissa IPA is named for the ELISSA, a three-masted barque moored at Galveston's Historic Seaport. Saint Arnold says it donates a portion of the beer's proceeds to the Galveston Historical Foundation to help preserve the ship. Wagner also told Chron that the brewery valued its relationship with the vessel and its owners.
The Galveston Historical Foundation says the ship first launched in 1877 and was purchased by the foundation for $40,000 in 1975 after being found in a scrapyard in Piraeus Harbor, Greece. Restoration began in 1978, and staff and volunteers completed the work by 1982, turning the vessel into a floating museum that actively sails. The ship is now the Official Tall Ship of Texas and a National Historic Landmark.
Why a Malty IPA Is Losing Ground
Wagner told Chron that Elissa's defining maltiness may not appeal to many current IPA drinkers, who often seek bigger hop profiles or juicier, New England-style hazy flavors. He described Elissa as a more balanced beer, reflecting a shift in preferences toward newer hop varieties and less bitter styles.
Hazy IPAs made up 1.5% of total U.S. craft beer sales by volume in 2018, rising to 7% by 2023, according to Brewers Association data cited by the San Francisco Chronicle. Brewers interviewed for that report said younger drinkers in particular gravitate toward the hazy style. “Shop talk is that younger drinkers like hazies,” John Martin, owner of Drake's Brewing Co. in the East Bay, told the outlet. “It doesn't have the bitterness. It's much smoother.” The report also noted that clearer styles like West Coast IPA still have a following, even as one source said that broadly, “people just don't like bitterness as much as they used to.”
IPAs as a category remain dominant regardless of style. The Brewers Association reported that the broader IPA group, including hazy and double IPAs, accounted for 51.3% of craft beer dollar sales over the past 52 weeks, up from 49.9% previously.
What Comes Next for Elissa — and Saint Arnold's Other IPAs
Saint Arnold's water system is part of what made Elissa IPA possible in the first place. The brewery could not produce an IPA before installing a reverse osmosis system, since its water carried too much calcium carbonate, according to Saint Arnold. That system strips incoming water, which arrives at roughly 300 to 500 parts per million of dissolved solids, down to about 5 ppm, allowing the brewery to build the clean base needed for hop-forward beers.
Wagner called Elissa the brewery's first IPA and said it was delicious, with a malty body built around Cascade hops, according to Chron's report. The beer has also picked up recognition beyond Houston, winning a gold medal in the English Ale category at the 2023 Great American Beer Festival, per Saint Arnold. A 2024 Chron feature on the brewery's history described Elissa as having “lots of hops but almost as much maltiness, resulting in a relatively balanced and slightly bitter beer.”
Saint Arnold has leaned further into West Coast-style IPAs in more recent years. The brewery introduced Art Car IPA in 2015 after Wagner challenged his brewers to create an American IPA, according to Chron's earlier reporting, and Art Car is now described as more West Coast-focused than Elissa. Even so, Wagner left the door open to Elissa's future: he suggested it could return as a special guest beer for a day or two in a few years, similar to how Saint Arnold has brought back its Santo beer for one-day Dia de los Muertos celebrations, per Chron.
A Later Addition to the IPA Lineup
Saint Arnold's official product page records that Art Car IPA debuted in August 2015, documenting a later IPA launch in the brewery's product history after Elissa's 2004 debut: Saint Arnold Brewing Company.
