The variable in this beer is a single hop. Everything else is the house recipe.

Dolcita Hop Monger went on draft at Well Crafted Beer Co.'s Lansdale brewpub on Friday, September 4. It is a hazy IPA at 7.1 percent, and a variant of Hop Monger, the standing hazy the brewery keeps on its regular list next to Double Hop Monger. Well Crafted describes it as the house favorite with a special added dose of Dolcita hops, lending intense notes of apricot, orchard ripe peach and juicy mango.

Dolcita is the part worth stopping on. The brewery identifies it as an experimental variety from Yakima Chief Ranches, and calls it a flavorful experimental hop with intense sweet and tropical notes. Experimental hops reach breweries in small lots well before any general release, so a beer built around one is an early look at something most drinkers will not have met yet.

The profile Well Crafted is reporting is a narrow one. Apricot, peach and mango are all soft stone fruit and sweet tropical, with no citrus anywhere in the list. There is no dank or herbal edge either. Hazy IPAs at this strength usually get their character from Citra and Mosaic, which bring grapefruit at one end and something closer to pine and garlic at the other. A beer resting entirely on ripe orchard fruit is a different shape.

That narrowness is also the argument for running the hop through Hop Monger instead of a new recipe. The base is already familiar to anyone who drinks at the brewpub, so whatever is different in the glass has one obvious source.

Dolcita Hop Monger is pouring at the Lansdale brewpub, with cans available to take home. It arrived on First Friday, following a chili cookoff earlier in the evening, with PixieTwist playing the room from 8 to 11 p.m.

Editor’s Take

Dolcita. Say it out loud and it more or less tells you what to expect, which is not a courtesy most hops extend. The Yakima valley has spent decades naming its varieties after mountains, rivers, minerals and the occasional four-digit number, and here is one that sounds like a dessert and then turns up tasting of apricot and ripe peach. Whether anybody planned that, I could not tell you. It has landed well either way.

What I actually admire is the method. Well Crafted has a house hazy called Hop Monger, and rather than build a whole new beer every time something interesting comes out of the hop fields, they put the new name in front of the old one and send it out the door. It is the brewing equivalent of a control group. You already know what the Monger tastes like, so anything unfamiliar in the glass has exactly one place it can have come from. A less confident brewery would have commissioned a new label, a new name and a backstory involving a wizard.

If you get hold of a can, that profile is asking for something salty and rich to lean against. Apricot and ripe peach next to a slab of aged cheddar, or with prosciutto, is the direction I would take it. Stone fruit and cured pork is an old and reliable arrangement, and there is no rule saying the fruit has to arrive as fruit.

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.

Dolcita Hop Monger Puts an Experimental Yakima Hop in the House IPA

Well Crafted's standing hazy IPA has picked up a new middle name. Dolcita is an experimental hop out of Yakima Chief Ranches, and the brewery is reporting apricot, ripe peach and mango at 7.1 percent.

Source & Editorial