Dawn patrol is surfing slang for the session you take at first light, before work and before the break gets crowded. It is also, conveniently, the hour at which most people want a coffee. Flux Brewing Company has built a beer on that overlap.
Dawn Patrol is a collaboration with Kai Cafe, a Hawaiian-themed coffee shop a few minutes from the brewery in Scotland, Ontario. Flux frames it in its release email as "two neighbourhood pals, two fan-favourite drinks, one slightly unconventional beer," and in this case the neighbourhood part is meant literally.
The unconventional part is the construction. Rather than starting a new recipe, Flux took the base from Kaleidoscope, the fruited sour it runs as a rotating series - currently a blueberry, dragon fruit and mango version, a peach and green tea version, and a blueberry apricot lemonade - and pointed it somewhere the series has never gone. Into the sour went coconut, macadamia nut, vanilla, coffee and lactose, which is the ingredient list of Kai's Hawaiian Latte rather than anything off the fruit shelf.
The brewery describes the result as silky, complex and subtly sour, with what it calls a sneaky pineapple kick. It lands at 6.0 percent according to Flux's beer list, a full point above the Kaleidoscope variants it shares a base with.
The can commits to the idea as thoroughly as the recipe does: a shark riding a sunrise wave in board shorts printed with coffee beans, and a palm tree whose trunk curves down and becomes a Kai Cafe takeaway cup, with coffee beans, macadamia nuts and seashells scattered along the bottom.
Dawn Patrol is on tap and in cans at the Flux taproom in Scotland, while supplies last.
Source & Editorial
JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.