. . . what beer might the resulting aromas make you think of?
For extra credit consider some or all of these options: Campers in the forest ate garlic pesto pizza last night; had mango ice cream for dessert; grapefruit at breakfast . . .
Now what beer?
Eldorado makes at least one.
Oops. Forgot to send a change of address to the guys at 21st Amendment Brewery. (The fact is the people who bought our house in New Mexico likely will be receiving stray beers for years. Should have advertised that when the house was on the market.)
So this can of Hop Crisis Imperial IPA traveled a thousand more miles than they might have expected. But it’s not like it spent months at sea, bobbing away. I’m pretty sure it arrived fresh because it was packed in hops that hadn’t gone over to the cheesy side. Instead, lots of citrus and pine, and maybe something a cat left behind.
The basic package for Hop Crisis includes four cans in the colorful box pictured here. The press package contained one can and loose hops that quickly made a mess of my desk. I once joked you could smell the hops in Deschutes Hop Henge Experimental IPA through the crown. Well, I did smell hops when I put this can in the fridge, because it was covered with sticky hop resin.
The fact sheet lists Columbus, Centennial and Cascade as bittering hops, but I think that means those are the ones used at various stages (in others words, also adding flavor and aroma) of the boil. It is dry hopped with Simcoe, Ahtanum, Amarillo and Cascade; thus the blast of citrus (from oranges to grapefruit) and pine that jumps from the glass. They say it has 94 IBU (International Bitterness Units), but I don’t know if that was measured in a lab or calculated. Either way, properly bitter. For good measure, it was aged on oak spirals.
The resulting beer won a silver medal at the 2010 Great American Beer Festival. It’s bold, complex and balanced in the Imperial IPA way.
Think you know where in the beer world this photo was taken?
(It is from the northern hemisphere, so obviously not what you’d call current.)
Please leave your answer as a comment.
I don’t have an answer, but I like the sound of names such as The Grape Hop and Canterbury Jacks.
They were part of the English hop landscape more than 100 years ago, and a curious soul might wonder what beers brewed with them would smell and taste like.
Would they offer “new flavors” or old ones? Would they stir up the same excitement Simcoe, Citra and Sorachi Ace do today simply because they are different?* Probably not, to be honest, because they were mostly variations on a theme. The new generation of hops have been bred from a wider range of ancestors.
*(Quick aside, Sorachi Ace is a great name, but I can’t visualize is growing alongside Golding in the hop gardens of Kent.)
Idle thoughts, really, while reading “English Hops: A History of Cultivation and Preparation for the Market from the Earliest Times.” Some other hop names from the 1919 book: Golden Tips, Pretty Wills’, Cobb’s Hop, Amos’s Early Bird and Old Jones’s Hop.
Old Jones’s Hop was “well-shaped, of good colour, of medium size, and of good flavour. The bine is short and green. it was cultivated under the name of Jones’s hop as early as 1798, but is now little grown, as it bears only a small crop.”
Even then the lesson was plain for a hop plant: Produce or be gone.