Green Cheek Beer Company's release notes for this one include a promise most breweries leave unwritten: fresh hop character without the garlic and onion.
That is a real claim rather than a flourish. Alliaceous notes, garlic and onion chief among them, are a known hazard in heavily dry-hopped beer. They tend to trace back to the hops themselves rather than to anything in the recipe. Put more of the same lot into the tank and whatever is in it arrives in the glass at higher volume. Naming their absence is a statement about hop selection, and about being confident enough in it to double the dose.
The dose is the whole idea. DDH 'Member IPA? is a double dry-hopped version of one of the brewery's staple West Coast IPAs, 7.0 percent and hopped with Mosaic alone. Green Cheek frames it as "how have we not done this one until now." That is what a brewery says about an idea that was sitting in plain sight.
Applying the treatment to a clear, bitter IPA cuts against type, since double dry-hopping is mostly hazy-beer vocabulary. The brewery is explicit that no haze is coming: no fluffy little clouds, in its words, just clear, bitter and dry. It describes blueberry cotton candy and fruit punch. That is roughly what Mosaic gives when there is a lot of it and nothing else competing for the aroma.
The 'Member name has turned up on more than one Green Cheek West Coast IPA. 'Member Rakau? is still on the current can list, so this reads as a family rather than a one-off.
Four-packs are 18 dollars, available now.
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.