If you’ve got new hop varieties, BentSpoke seems like a natural place to send them. The brewery have long showed their skills at brewing IPAs and Crankshaft remains one of the most popular (OK, the most popular according to the public vote) IPAs in the land. Naturally it means the brewery is part of NZ Hops’ Bract Brewing Programme which sees the grower partner with breweries around the world to get better insights into their experimental varieties.
For Bract To The Ditch, BentSpoke have used NZH-106 and NZH-109 to make a New Zealand IPA that’s as punchy as they come. Crack into it and you’ll find heavy doses of citrus, loads of peach, juicy nectarine, kiwifruit and a mix of tropical fruit. Sitting towards the hazier end of beer’s scale there remains enough bitterness - not to mention a light touch of pine - to have the mind swirling to the West Coast. Sure, they might not grow well there but Canberra’s certainly a natural home for hops.
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