City of the Future Gives Nelson Sauvin Room Next to Three Citras

North Park Beer Co. is out with City of the Future, a triple dry-hopped Hazy Double IPA built on a stack of seven hops: Mosaic Cryo, Citra DynaBoost, Citra Cryo, Nelson Sauvin, Citra, Mosaic, and Strata. It's one of four can and draft releases the San Diego brewery dropped together this week, and at 8.5 percent ABV it's the biggest of the four.

The brewery describes the flavor as strawberry, dole whip, and white gummy bear, with juicy white grape underneath and orange zest and dank citrus up front in the aroma. That's a sweeter, fruitier register than the pine-and-resin territory triple dry-hopping usually implies.

Thinking about the hops and flavor profile

Three different Citra variants (DynaBoost, Cryo, and standard) would normally be enough to define a beer on their own, pushing hard toward the tropical, candied-citrus lane Citra is known for. What makes this bill worth a second look is Nelson Sauvin sitting alongside them. Nelson is the hop most associated with a white-wine, gooseberry character, and it doesn't usually get much room to operate next to a Citra-heavy lineup. Here it appears to be doing real work - the white grape note the brewery calls out reads like a fairly direct expression of what Nelson brings to a glass, layered on top of Citra's tropical fruit and Strata's dankness rather than buried under it. It's a less predictable outcome than most seven-hop stacks produce, where the biggest, loudest hop tends to win.

City of the Future is available now in cans and on draft at North Park's taprooms, with pickup and California shipping options through the brewery's site.