Hop Beard Dry-Hops With Simcoe and Its Own Descendant, Mosaic

Fonta Flora calls this its "forever" West Coast IPA. That is a better word than flagship and means roughly the same thing: the beer the brewery does not stop making, regardless of what else is going on.

A fresh batch of Hop Beard arrives September 11. It runs 7 percent and is dry-hopped with Amarillo, Citra, Mosaic and Simcoe.

There is nothing obscure in that lineup, and that is the point of a forever beer. What is worth noticing is the relationship inside it. Mosaic was bred from a Simcoe mother plant and released in 2012, twelve years after Simcoe itself. Putting both into the same dry hop sets a variety next to its own descendant, and they did not inherit the same things. Simcoe leans pine, resin and a little onion-adjacent intensity. Mosaic took the fruit and ran - blueberry, mango, stone fruit - which is a large part of why it became a hazy IPA staple.

Amarillo and Citra fill in the citrus between them. The result is a bill weighted toward fruit for something calling itself West Coast, which is a reasonable way to keep a decade-old recipe drinking like a current one.

The can keeps it simple: a beard rendered entirely in hop cones, on white, with the style set in lowercase underneath. Fonta Flora shot it in the warehouse, sitting among cases printed with "local agriculture" - the second half of the brewery's own tagline, "local culture. local agriculture."

The fresh batch is available starting September 11 through Fonta Flora's wholesale accounts.