Passager Returns on Its Fourth Brew, Improved Each Time

A returning beer usually comes back as itself. Brasserie du Bas-Canada is presenting Passager differently. The Gatineau brewery says this is the fourth time it has brewed the Double IPA, and that it has improved the beer on each pass. Its assessment of the version going on sale today is that it is frankly excellent.

Passager is hopped with Citra and Enigma. Bas-Canada calls it outrageously hopped, with several doses of both varieties. The tasting notes run to tropical fruit and white grape, over a character the brewery itself puts in quotation marks: dank. It is 8.0 percent ABV in 473 ml cans, with a limit of 24 cans per person.

Those notes sit at opposite ends of the hop vocabulary. Dank is the resinous, faintly herbal register, and it usually turns up with pine and citrus rind. White grape is the bright, wine-like one. Enigma accounts for the second of them. It is an Australian variety from Hop Products Australia, and white wine and berry are its standard descriptors. Citra supplies the tropical fruit. The dank end is harder to pin on either hop, and is more likely a product of how much hop material the beer is carrying.

The name and the label are working together. Passager is French for passenger. The can shows a small figure lifted in a beam of light toward a flying saucer, above a rocky ridgeline, in periwinkle and salmon.

Cans go on sale online at 11 a.m. today through bascanada.beer. This drop is coming from the brewery's Gatineau site rather than the newer Hautes-Plaines location, and buyers have a week to collect an order. The Gatineau tasting room is open today. Bank Hotel is the second beer in the same release.