Three hops, all from the same New Zealand grower, and one of them tells you what it does before you open the can. Brasserie du Bas-Canada has brought back Themis 3000, its Double IPA made with Mortalis Brewing Company. The beer is built on Nectaron, Peacharine and Motueka from Freestyle Hops.

The Gatineau brewery describes the trio as heavy artillery and the result as a Double IPA saturated with hops. Its notes list intense tropical fruit, nectarine and citrus zest before finishing on the dank, resinous character that hop vocabulary usually describes in cannabis terms. It is 8.2 percent ABV in 473 ml cans, with a limit of 24 cans per person.

The hop bill is worth a moment. Nectaron is the modern New Zealand workhorse for exactly this kind of beer, a variety known for passionfruit and stone fruit intensity. Motueka is the older and quieter of the three, a Saaz descendant that brings lime and lemon zest and a faint herbal edge. That is most likely where the citrus zest in the brewery's notes comes from. Peacharine sits between them and does not require much interpretation: the name is peach and nectarine run together, and nectarine duly turns up third in the tasting notes. Putting all three together gives a beer that leans stone fruit rather than the pineapple-and-mango default a lot of hazy Double IPAs land on.

Mortalis, based in Avon, New York, has partnered with Bas-Canada on this recipe before. The brewery calls the collaboration legendary and says it brewed the beer again at popular demand.

Cans go on sale online at 11 a.m. today through bascanada.beer, filled from the brewery's Hautes-Plaines site, with a week to collect an order. Both the Gatineau and Hautes-Plaines taprooms are open.

Editor’s Take

Somebody at Freestyle Hops looked at a new variety, tasted peach, tasted nectarine, and stopped there. Peacharine. No Greek deity, no acronym, no four-digit breeding number waiting for a marketing department to rescue it - just the two fruits, welded together, done before lunch. In a category that has spent a decade naming hops after mountains, thunder gods and vague states of mind, the honesty is almost startling.

And it works, which is the part I enjoy most. Read the brewery's tasting notes and nectarine is sitting right there in the list, third word in, exactly where the hop's name said it would be. Nobody had to decode anything. Meanwhile the beer itself is called Themis 3000 and wears a blindfolded figure holding scales on the can, so the mythology budget clearly went somewhere. It just went to the label instead of the hop farm, which is the correct allocation.

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.

Themis 3000 Pairs Nectaron and Motueka With a Hop Called Peacharine

Back by demand, the Gatineau brewery's Double IPA with Mortalis returns at 8.2 percent on three Freestyle Hops varieties: Nectaron, Peacharine and Motueka. Online orders open at 11 a.m.

Source & Editorial