Three more One Drop specials for you: two different IPA variants heavily leaning on their Clean Fusion technique with wildly different hop combos; and, of course, a healthy dose of fruit and lactose for good measure just to finish it all off. Shall we?
Broader Than Broadway hits the deck first in all its West Coast glory. The first thing I’ll say is this is the kind of WCIPA that can remind you why it was the only style you wanted to drink for a few years there. Broadway is hitting all the right notes without seemingly trying too hard. Pouring a bright amber with a bit of hop haze, it features a couple of old school US hops with a couple of modern classics: Comet and Centennial bring the stonefruit and pine while Mosaic and Idaho 7 bring tropical fruit and citrus.
There’s notes of papaya, candied orange, mango and lemon on the nose, with orange and dank pine flowing through in the mouth. The bitterness profile is superb here with a properly bitter bite upfront that leads into a smooth, lingering bitterness and a clean and crisp finish. It leaves you waiting for that caramel malt sweetness that never actually arrives. That’s a good thing.
Finally, One Drop have brewed a beer for the average person on the street for whom using double the amount of dry hop is simply not enough.
Family Guy style cut to the One Drop office where on a big whiteboard the letters DDH DIPA are written and the whole brew team are crowded around.
“But what if we change one of these Ds to a T?”
Brewer is being held aloft by cheering colleagues, handed a Nobel Prize and a box of Cadbury Favourites. End Scene.
Southern Hospitality is a TDH DIPA absolutely crammed to the gills with One Drop’s darling hops Citra, Mosaic and Vic Secret. This opaque golden beauty explodes with a tropical fruit tsunami of passionfruit, pineapple, mango, lemon peel and a hoppy herbaceousness which is akin to being spoon fed T-90 pellets. For an 8 percent ABV beer, the malt platform is super lean and clean with a hint of biscuity malt sweetness that allows the hops to do their thing. The big surprise here is how subdued the overall bitterness is: it’s moderate, but after experiencing all those complex hop compounds, you’re braced for more. The finish is so crisp and clean, I could have sworn this was fermented on a lager yeast.
Now, with all that serious business out of the way, let’s just vibe a bit hey? Splice Up Your Life is a twist on an Australian summer classic: the pine/lime Splice. Built on a base of One Drop’s imperial pastry sour, instead of pineapple, we’ve been handed a combination of white grape free run juice (free run juice comes from grapes that split under their own pressure, before they are mechanically pressed) and passionfruit purée to go with the lime.
The resulting beer is a delight. Aromas of creamy vanilla, sweet maple syrup and passionfruit meld with a distinct lime zest and sherbet like flavour to create a delicious facsimile of a Splice ice cream. It’s also much more tart than I expected, with a citric acid like sourness playing off the grape juice and lactose sweetness to maintain some semblance of balance.
Judd Owen
Published October 12, 2022 2022-10-12 00:00:00
