Reverse Cowgirl Sends a West Coast IPA South for Its Hops

Paperback kept the dry, bitter frame of a West Coast IPA and filled it with Australian and New Zealand hops. The tasting notes read like a wine shelf, and the beer never leaves the tasting room.

Style: Southern Hemisphere West Coast IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-05
ABV: 7.2%
Paperback Brewing Co (Glendale, CA)

Southern Hemisphere West Coast IPA is a contradiction wearing both names at once. The West Coast half is a structural promise, meaning dry, bitter, and clear-headed. The Southern Hemisphere half is about where the hops grew, roughly eight thousand miles from the coast the style is named after.

Paperback Brewing Co is releasing Reverse Cowgirl into that gap on Saturday. It is a 7.2 percent IPA at 55 IBUs, led by Enigma with Citra and Nelson rounding it out, and the brewery says it packed more hops into it than any IPA it has made.

The hop list explains the tasting notes almost line by line. Paperback describes white grape, redcurrant, raspberry, citrus, and mango, plus a slight dank edge. Nelson Sauvin is a New Zealand variety whose defining character is white wine grape, to the point that its name is a nod to sauvignon blanc. Enigma is Australian, and redcurrant and raspberry are the notes it is best known for. Citra, the one American hop in the mix, covers the citrus and mango. Three hops, three distinct jobs, and very little overlap between them.

That matters more in a dry beer than a sweet one. The brewery calls this snappy, dry, and crisp, which means there is no residual sugar to blur the edges of any of those flavors. Fruit character in a beer built this way has to come from hops alone and stays sharply defined rather than jammy.

Reverse Cowgirl is a tasting room exclusive, on draft and in cans at 422 Magnolia Avenue in Glendale, with four-packs to go. The launch party runs Saturday, September 5, from noon to 11 p.m., with a beer and limited-edition shirt bundle for twenty dollars while the shirts hold out. Bun and Blanket will be on the charcoal grill with Santa Maria-style prime tri-tip and pork linguica, which is a fortunate pairing: a dry, firmly bitter IPA is one of the few things that can follow smoked beef fat without either side giving ground.

Editor’s Take

Read the tasting notes for this one without being told what it is and you would guess somebody had opened a bottle of sauvignon blanc next to a punnet of raspberries. White grape, redcurrant, raspberry. That is not IPA vocabulary as it stood twenty years ago, when the whole genre ran on pine, resin, and grapefruit pith and the highest compliment available was that a beer had stripped your palate for parts.\n\nWhat makes it work is that the bitterness never left. Fifty-five IBUs is a real number, and the beer is described as snappy and dry rather than soft. So the fruit arrives inside a structure built to resist it, which is a more interesting place to be than either extreme. All of that, incidentally, is on a can showing a woman riding a horse backwards under the line about the best ride being backwards - a beer that puts its entire thesis on the label and then commits to it in the hop bill.

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.