Head Brewer/Co-Founder Eric Bramwell
Today's Brewer's Corner is all about one of our favorite styles of beer: West Coast IPA.
What that means today though can be different things to different people. Some think piney, resinous hops with a solid malt backbone. Others think it's dry and intensely bitter. Neither of these are wrong, but the direction we're leaning is what we've seen recently coming out of California which is a "new school" West Coast IPA.
What exactly is a New School WC IPA, or "California Style IPA"? We are essentially taking some of the things we love about our hazies, but upping the bitterness and drying everything out. Our take on the modern West Coast IPA is creating the perfect vessel to deliver hops to your taste buds. We don't want malt based flavors or residual sugar getting in the way of those hop flavors and aromatics.
That's not to say these beers will be overly bitter, resiney pine bombs. We take a similar approach that we do for our hazies for our hopping. A restrained, but present bitterness, and a heavy focus on late addition kettle hops as well as huge amounts of dry hops in the fermenter.
The beer that results from this approach will be a golden colored hoppy delight. Bitter enough to cleanse your palette and keep you ready for the next sip. Fruit forward hop flavors without necessarily coming across as juicy. Little residual sweetness getting in the way of maximum hop flavor. A clean, crisp fermenting yeast that doesn't create much in the way of flavor or aromatics on its own, letting the hops do all the heavy lifting.
So this brings us to Hornet's Bite, the first of what we'd consider our approach to this style of West Coast IPA. We brewed this beer once before, but tried a different yeast that didn't pan out the way we'd hoped. This latest batch is dialed in the way we plan to move forward for the style as a whole. Hopped with Nelson Sauvin and Mosaic hops, this beer will have notes of white grape, citrus, blueberry, with a background herbal note and just enough bitterness to keep it refreshing. We REALLY like how this batch came out and we hope you will too.
While we will continue to brew and improve our haze game, we're very excited to further explore this version of West Coast IPA. Expect to see more of these on our taps and out in distribution. There's a wide world of hops out there, and this is another wonderful style to explore them.
Cheers!
Eric Bramwell
Head Brewer/Co-founder
Riverlands Brewing Company