Cosmic Empire Runs Citra Twice, in Two Different Forms

Twin Lights has Cosmic Empire pouring again, and most of its hop bill arrives as concentrate rather than pellets. Citra shows up twice, processed two different ways.

Style: Hazy IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-02
ABV: 5.6%
Twin Lights Brewing (Tinton Falls, NJ)

Most of the hops in Cosmic Empire never make it into the tank as hops.

Twin Lights Brewing has its 5.6 percent hazy IPA pouring again at the Tinton Falls taproom, and the hop bill it published is worth reading slowly: Citra and Mosaic Incognito, Lupomax Citra, and Krush. Only that last one is a conventional pellet.

Incognito is a liquid hop product, hop oil concentrated down out of pellets and dosed in a fraction of the volume. Lupomax is a concentrated lupulin pellet, sieved so that the resin and oil make up more of what goes in the tank and the leafy plant matter makes up less. Both exist for the same reason: brewers wanted more aroma per pound without the grassy, vegetal edge that a heavy conventional dry hop can drag in, and without soaking up quite so much beer in wet hop material.

What stands out is that Citra appears twice, in two of those formats. That is a deliberate choice rather than a redundancy. The oil concentrate and the lupulin pellet pull different fractions out of the same variety, so running both is a way of getting two angles on one hop instead of reaching for a second name to fill the gap.

The brewery describes big tropical notes of mango, pineapple, and lime, balanced by a smooth, juicy mouthfeel and just enough bitterness. At 5.6 percent it is on the lighter side for the style, which is where all that concentrated aroma has the most room to be noticed.

Cosmic Empire is pouring now at the taproom on Asbury Avenue. Twin Lights beer also turns up at liquor stores, bars, and restaurants around New Jersey.

Editor’s Take

Somewhere along the way the hop trade stopped selling hops and started selling hop derivatives, and the labels have never quite caught up. Incognito, Lupomax, Cryo, Spectrum, Salvo - it reads less like a farm and more like a range of mid-priced sedans. Cosmic Empire is running two of them at once, and using them on the same hop.\n\nThat is the part worth sitting with. Citra turns up here twice, once as concentrated oil and once as concentrated lupulin, which means Twin Lights is not treating Citra as a single ingredient so much as a variety with two distinct settings. It is the brewing equivalent of buying the same spice ground and whole because they do different jobs in the pan. Krush, the one plain pellet hop in the mix, must feel like it wandered into the wrong meeting.

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.