Toro

Out on a farm in Ayr, Ontario, somewhere between the crops and the canning line, Willibald has released a Double IPA with the confidence of a beer that knows exactly what it's doing. Toro doesn't ease you in gently. At 8.2% ABV, this is the kind of can you respect from a distance before deciding you're having a second one anyway.

The hop bill here is the real story. Toro is built with Superdelic, Citra, and Dolcita, plus something called Wai-iti Hop Juice, an innovative product out of Freestyle Farms in New Zealand designed to deliver stone fruit flavor and aroma without dragging along extra bitterness. It's essentially hop technology solving the age-old problem of wanting your beer to taste like a peach without also wanting it to taste like a lawn.

Willibald has built its whole operation around the idea of doing things properly and locally, brewing everything proudly on their own farm rather than shipping the process out. That farm-to-can pipeline shows up in how deliberate this release feels, less a rush job and more the result of someone deciding a strong beer deserved a genuinely interesting hop lineup rather than just more of the usual suspects.

Toro was canned on July 2nd and is rolling out across Ontario, from the farm retail shop to the St. Jacobs and Kitchener markets to wider provincial delivery, so there's a reasonable chance this one finds you rather than the other way around. At 473ml a can, it's sized for someone who takes their Double IPAs seriously and isn't planning on sharing.

If you like your hops loud but your bitterness politely absent, Toro is worth tracking down. Just maybe don't plan on operating heavy farm equipment afterward.