How about that? Today marks the halfway point of this little venture. For any of you who are reading these, I'm sure it feels a lot longer than 12 days, but for me it has been a real pleasure to get back to doing this. I know writing about beer is probably quite an inane thing to be doing, but it at least legitimises my strong desire to have a drink every day.
That makes it sound like I have a problem, maybe I do, I'm not one for self-control generally speaking and when it comes to a decent beer I have none whatsoever. I remember talking to a colleague, deep into the first lockdown in 2020, who said they hadn't touched a drop the entire time, which blew my mind. How can you make it through a normal day without wanting some suds at the end of it, let alone total lockdown in the midst of a global pandemic? Some people are just plain weird, but then it takes a weirdo to spot a weirdo I guess.
Oh well, as you're here you may as well join me as I give in to my lack of self-control for your reading pleasure.
Hop Drops
Style - Extra Pale Ale
Brewer - Rye River Brewing Co.
Hops - Citra
ABV - 4.5%
The beer
Rye River Brewing Co are new to me. Seemingly they are a brewer from County Kildare, Ireland, which is nice to know, not that that knowledge is of much consequence really. What's intriguing is that they claim to be the world's most decorated brewery (or one of, at least) which either means they have a shit load of tinsel knocking about, or that they know their stuff. What's not so intriguing, but no less gratifying is that they tell you what hops they're using - I like this. I don't like buying wine that has been generically labelled simply as "red", "white" or "blended" (nor any combination of those with a nationality as a prefix). I want to know what grapes are being used as this helps me develop my palate and get a better sense of what I like and what I don't. Yes, I know French wines play by their own rules, but then again they would, wouldn't they? For the same reason, I want a hop bill. Tell me what's in your beer, I don't want generic descriptors such as "American hops", "fresh hops" or any other such vagueness. Having been a craft beer drinker for a while I have a good idea of what hops I like and those I don't.
Perhaps these brewers who forego the hop bill are worried about alienating newcomers? Maybe giving too much information is daunting to the uninitiated. But I don't think so. It could be that these brewers think they have stumbled upon the beer equivalent of the recipe for coca-cola and they're so worried that someone will reverse engineer a perfect replica of their beer and then maliciously undercut them on price, driving them out of business and taking their portion of the market. Again, I am highly sceptical. My feeling is that brewers that don't give hop bills are trying to hide using shit quality ingredients. Seeing generic hop descriptors on a can is the same to me as seeing mechanically recovered meat on the ingredient list for a sausage roll. It's not going to make me stop eating it, but I'm probably going to feel a little uneasy about doing so.
The good news, after all of that, and as I already said, is that Rye River's Hop Drops does list the hops, or hop rather - Citra (no mechanically recovered hop residue here, I hope). I will now talk about Hop Drops and try not to deviate again.
Hop Drops is by far the most crystalline beer I have seen in a long while, I can literally (and I mean literally in the literal sense, not the figurative sense) read the can label through this beer. Don't get me wrong, I've got a craze for haze, but man do I love a crisp looking beer too.
The nose on Hop Drops isn't massively heady, again no bad thing, but I do like to get an idea of what's to come. There's a hint of that classic citra dank note and some light citrus - maybe lemon or lime - but just a wee drop. So, I am expecting this to be lightly bitter, a touch dank and some zingy citrus, but not an explosion of juice.
How wrong I was. Ok, there is a touch of dankness (I hate myself every time I use that word - and yes, I hate myself often), a decent hit of edge of the tongue bitterness and a massive explosion of tart pomelo flavour. This is genuinely wild. This has the kind of flavour profile I would associate with a beer a good 2-3% stronger in ABV terms, and a hell of a lot murkier. Ah! I see what they've done here (I have really just seen this on the can), they appear to have run the beer through a centrifuge - you know, one of those machines forensic scientists use to extract DNA from semen, as well as for other reasons. I'm guessing that this is how Rye River have managed to pack so much heft into Hop Drops while still retaining a crystal clear finish. That's some straight up Heston Blumenthal shit right there and I love it.
Score - 4.75/5
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