Name: Fresh Hop Luminosa Hazy IPA
Brand: Ferment Brewing Company
Availability: InStock

Luminosa's parent hop is best known for tasting faintly of dill. The descendant was bred firmly in the other direction.

Ferment Brewing Company has released Fresh Hop Luminosa Hazy IPA at 6.6 percent, one of four fresh hop beers the Hood River brewery is running this season. The wet cones came from Coleman Alluvial Farm. Ferment describes a bright, bold hazy IPA with zippy notes of guava and lemon, and writes that the hop arrives "with waves of samba and merengue."

The variety deserves a paragraph of its own. Luminosa came out of Oregon State University's hop breeding program, where Shaun Townsend collected open-pollinated seed from a Sorachi Ace female in 2013. Indie Hops launched it commercially with the 2022 harvest. Sorachi Ace is one of the genuinely polarizing hops - lemon, lemongrass and a herbal, dill-like edge that brewers either build an entire beer around or avoid on principle. Luminosa was selected to hold onto the citrus and leave the dill behind, and it carries very little of the pine and resin that would otherwise crowd it out.

That breeding history shows up in the fruit. Indie Hops lists candied orange peel, papaya, boysenberry and peach-mango lemonade among the variety's descriptors, so the guava and lemon Ferment is pointing at sits comfortably inside the range the hop is known to give. Undried, the citrus end of that generally reads brighter and greener again.

It is also a young hop to be spending on a wet-hop beer. Fresh hop brewing is a one-shot proposition each September, and a brewery only gets a handful of them in a career. Handing one of four slots to a variety with four commercial harvests behind it is a more interesting choice than another Citra would have been.

Worth thinking about at the table: a hop this heavy on lemon and tropical fruit, with almost no resin behind it, leaves room for food that a more bitter IPA would flatten. This would sit well beside fish tacos, ceviche, or anything already carrying a wedge of lime.

Fresh Hop Luminosa Hazy IPA is available now on draft and in 16-ounce cans.

Editor’s Take

Most hop descriptions are a fruit salad with delusions of grandeur. Ferment has gone a different way and said Luminosa arrives with waves of samba and merengue, which are two rather different dances from two rather different countries, and I am not going to be the one who raises that. It is a better sentence than another list of stone fruit. It also tells you the one thing a fruit list never does, which is what the hop is like to be around.

There is a real case underneath the dancing. Luminosa reportedly takes its name from the Latin for full of brightness, and it is the tidied-up descendant of Sorachi Ace, the variety responsible for brewing's long-running lemon-and-dill problem. Somebody spent the better part of a decade selecting for the lemon and against the dill. What came out the other side is bright, tropical and almost entirely free of resin. Telling people it dances gets you there faster than I just did.

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.

Fresh Hop Luminosa Hazy IPA Runs on a Sorachi Ace Descendant

Luminosa grew out of an open-pollinated Sorachi Ace seed, selected to keep the lemon and lose the dill. Ferment has put the undried cones into a 6.6 percent hazy IPA, on now in cans and on draft.

Source & Editorial