Floating Above Clouds Adds Cold-Pressed Nelson Sauvin Hop Kief

Floating Above Clouds is North Park Beer Co.'s newest Hazy IPA, one of four releases the San Diego brewery packaged together this week. It's triple dry-hopped with Citra Incognito, Citra Cryo, Citra, Nelson Sauvin, Nelson Sauvin Cold Pressed Hop Kief, and Galaxy.

At 7 percent ABV, it sits lighter than its DIPA-strength siblings in the same release. The brewery describes notes of guava, stone fruit, and lychee, with lime zest and honeysuckle rounding things out.

Thinking about the hops and flavor profile

Two forms of Nelson Sauvin in one beer is a fairly specific choice. The standard hop and the cold-pressed kief version extract different things from the same plant - kief concentrates the lupulin (the resin that carries most of a hop's aroma) without the leafy plant matter that comes along in a whole-cone or pellet form, which tends to produce a cleaner, more perfume-like note rather than a grassy one. That likely explains why this beer, despite leaning on three separate Citra variants that would normally push it toward citrus and tropical fruit, comes out closer to honeysuckle and lychee - a softer, more floral result than the citrus-bomb profile triple dry-hopping usually points to.

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