A Cold IPA from Wayfinder Beer is a slightly different proposition than a Cold IPA from anywhere else. The Portland brewery says it brewed the first one in October 2018, under the name Relapse IPA as a tribute to Relapse Records. The style has since travelled far enough that plenty of drinkers have had one without knowing where it started.
Midnight Eyes is the brewery's current entry, out now at 7% ABV. Wayfinder's pub list describes notes of floral sweet rose punch, lavender, pomelo, lemon peel and pink starburst.
Cold IPA is easier to define by method than by flavor, and Wayfinder publishes its own recipe logic. The malt bill is a lager bill: 20 to 40 percent rice or corn mashed alongside American two-row pilsner malt, with no caramel malts at all. Fermentation uses a lager yeast run warm, picked for finishing quickly while producing little in the way of esters or sulfur. The dry hopping also happens warm, during spunding or krausening. Those are two ways of adding hops while fermentation is still active: sealing the tank so the beer's own carbon dioxide builds up, or adding freshly fermenting beer to it. The brewery's stated reason is that this achieves biotransformation without letting any oxygen in. That is the process by which live yeast reshapes hop compounds into new aromatics.
The result, in Wayfinder's framing, is exceptionally dry, hoppy and clean - the antithesis of a hazy IPA. The brewery's own phrase for it is "Wester than West Coast." That last line explains why this release turns up in the newsletter filed under West Coast IPA while the can reads Cold IPA. The two sit close enough together that the label is a matter of degree.
What makes the flavor list interesting is how little the method leaves to lean on. Rice and corn in place of specialty malt, no caramel sweetness, a yeast chosen for keeping quiet, and a finish scrubbed dry. There is no body to soften anything and no malt character to blend into. Whatever aroma the hops contribute is the entire aromatic content of the beer.
Building that on rose and lavender is a real choice. Delicate florals are the first thing a heavier beer buries, and they are also the first thing to seem overdone if there is nothing else happening. Pomelo is the note that ties it together: the ancestor of the grapefruit, larger and thicker-skinned, with more perfume and less of the bitter bite its descendant is known for. A West Coast IPA would reach for the grapefruit. This one is reaching one generation further back.
Midnight Eyes is pouring now in half-liter servings at Wayfinder's Portland pub on SE 2nd Avenue.
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.