This may be openeing a can of worms, or it may even be an opinionated thing rather than a fact, but what actually makes a new england IPA (NEIPA) a NEIPA?
More like a full wormery...
If this is the case, what would then be the difference between that and a hazy IPA?
First you have to remember that all "styles" are a bit fluid, particularly at a time when beer is evolving rapidly. Time was when all IPAs were made with Goldings and were sent to India, but terminology moved on.
But broadly I think you should regard NEIPA as ancestral to and a subset of the hazies, which now encompass things like many of the modern cask beers which are lower ABV than classic NEIPAs.
And I think you need to think about what they're not, which is the classic West Coast IPA characterised by lots of bitterness (BU:GU>1), pine/grapefruity "C" hops whose flavour comes mostly from terpenoids, and clean US yeast (usually US-05/WLP001/1056) that contributes little to the final flavour.
As one HBTer
never ceases to remind us, some of the most highly regarded New England brewers don't actually fit the format that gets handed down to homebrewers. In particular they tend not to use high-protein adjuncts like wheat or oats; many of their beers use US 2-row and one of chit/dextrin/honey malt and nothing else. Adjuncts may be necessary if you're using UK pale malts which have lower protein content than their US counterparts, but those adjuncts tend to be bad for shelf life.
Another Chinese whisper is the lack of bittering - many of the classics get around 25 IBU from boil additions. A small 60 minute addition can help stability, mash/FWH bittering is probably even better.
They also tend to have a more even split between whirlpool and dry hop - Sapwood (Tonsmeire/Janish) do an even ~12g/l in each, whereas 6g/l WP and 12-24g/l dry hop is fairly typical. But commercial breweries will be reducing the grassy effects of such large amounts of hop material by using extracts like Incognito and centrifuging. The extracts are starting to become available at homebrew level but otherwise all you can really do is keep the dry hops short - 24h should be enough to get most of the good stuff out. A blend of 2:1:1 Citra:Mosaic:Galaxy is a good starting point, but there's whole threads out there on the best hop combinations to use.
Haze should not be an objective and it's not a result of suspended yeast or adding stuff like raw flour (!) - it seems to be an accidental by-product of the interaction between grist protein and hop polyphenols, Southern Hemisphere hops tend to have more of the latter.
The classic first-generation NEIPAs pretty much all used a member of the Conan family like Yeast Bay WLP4000, but these days Wyeast 1318 has pretty much become the de facto standard. But any British yeast can work and I suspect that the US hasn't really woken up to the diversity of yeast we have here, so I'd encourage you to play around with different British yeasts, particularly ones that don't come from the usual suspects. Dry yeast has the great advantage of not needing oxygen in the fermentation, eg Cloudwater are now usuing Lallemand New England in a number of their beers, and at one point Tree House seem to have used a blend that looks something like 87% S-04, 8% T-58, 5% WB-06.
So in general the recipes are pretty simple, the devil is in the process. Obsess about minimising oxygen contact. Constant fermentation temperatures produce fewer esters than moving temperatures around. Having a main dry hop after you've dropped most of the yeast out with a cool/cold crash seems to reduce hop burn significantly.
Braufessors recipe or
Dgallo's test recipe are good places to start. Get
Scott Janish's book if you can.
