Trail Guide Everett Is Back, Still Running on New Zealand Riwaka

A West Coast IPA that gets its pine from the Southern Hemisphere. Sidekick has brought Trail Guide Everett back, built on Riwaka, a New Zealand hop scarce enough that most breweries never get an allocation.

Style: West Coast IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-08
ABV: 6.5%
Sidekick Brewing (Chilliwack, BC)

The pine in this West Coast IPA is coming from the wrong hemisphere, and that is the point of it.

Sidekick Brewing has brought Trail Guide Everett back to its Chilliwack taproom, a 6.5 percent West Coast IPA running at 60 IBU. The Fraser Valley brewery calls it a modern classic and credits New Zealand Riwaka hops with a bold pine, citrus and passionfruit aroma.

Riwaka is the detail worth stopping on. It is a New Zealand variety, a Saazer descendant bred in the Motueka region, and it is genuinely hard to get. Plantings are small, demand from breweries outside New Zealand consistently outruns supply, and a lot of brewers who would like to use it simply cannot lay hands on any. Building a returning beer around it, rather than a one-off, is a supply decision as much as a flavor one.

It also sits at an angle to the style. A traditional West Coast IPA leans on American hops for its resin and grapefruit. Riwaka pushes a different combination: the passionfruit and citrus that Southern Hemisphere hops are known for, but with more of the sharp, herbal, almost oily character that keeps it from reading as tropical fruit juice. Bitterness at 60 IBU is high by contemporary standards and firmly in keeping with the old version of the style, which is presumably the classic half of "modern classic."

Sidekick flagged the beer's return with a welcome-back note rather than a new-release one. It is in stock now at the Vedder Mountain Road taproom.

Editor’s Take

Riwaka is one of those hops that inspires a particular kind of quiet desperation among brewers. There is not much of it, there has never been much of it, and New Zealand's growing area is a rounding error next to the Yakima Valley, so an allocation tends to be the sort of thing a brewery mentions to other brewers in the manner of someone who has just been upgraded on a flight. Sidekick has enough of it to bring a beer back for a second run, which is its own kind of statement.

What I enjoy is the geography of the thing. A style named after one coast, built on a hop grown at the top of an island roughly eleven thousand kilometres from that coast, brewed in the Fraser Valley, and sold under a picture of a man in a beanie looking at a mountain. West Coast IPA long ago stopped being a description of where anything came from and became a description of how a beer behaves: dry, bitter, clear about its intentions. Everett behaves. That is the whole job.

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.