C-Minus Is Named for the Hops It Deliberately Leaves Out

Pivotal Brewing Company has named its newest IPA after the hops it left on the shelf. C-Minus is a West Coast IPA at 6.6 percent, and the brewery built it specifically around varieties outside the traditional C group: CTZ, Chinook, Centennial and Cascade. Mosaic, Strata, Krush and Simcoe went in instead. Hence the grade.

The omission is a bigger deal than the pun lets on. Those four are close to the founding document of the style. Cascade, released in 1972, is the hop that set American craft brewing on its hop-forward course. Centennial and Chinook supplied the grapefruit and pine that people still mean when they say West Coast. Columbus, the C in CTZ, is the high-alpha workhorse doing the bittering in a great many of them. Take all four out and most of what the category was built on goes with them.

What Pivotal put in their place leans newer and more tropical. Strata came out of Oregon's hop breeding program and carries passionfruit alongside a dank, resinous edge. Mosaic is a berry and stone-fruit variety bred from a Simcoe mother plant. That makes the two of them parent and child in the same bill. Simcoe is the one holdover from the old guard here, and it never had a C to lose in the first place.

The malt bill handles the other half of the job. Pilsner malt and flaked rice is a lager recipe more than an ale one. Rice ferments out almost completely and leaves very little behind. The body thins, the finish dries, and nothing competes with the hops for attention. That is the point of putting it there.

Pivotal describes bursting aromas of tropical fruit, candied peaches and mixed berries, with a finish it calls tangy, crisp and pleasantly bitter. The brewery opens its release notes by declaring an end to "pine resin coating your tongue and harsh bitterness making your enamel tingle." That is a fair summary of what the C hops used to be asked to do.

C-Minus is pouring now at the Bristol taproom, on draft and in cans to go.