The name is doing more work than it looks. Green Cheek Beer Company already brews a beer called Liquid Photograph, a New Zealand-style pale ale at 5.4 percent. High-Res Liquid Photograph is the same picture with more information in it.

It arrived today as the first half of what the brewery is calling a Special Labor Day Drop: a double dry-hopped New Zealand-style pale ale on Nelson and Motueka, 5.4 percent, 16 dollars a four-pack. Green Cheek says this version is saturated with even higher levels of New Zealand hops than its predecessor.

The matching ABV is the interesting part. The usual way to make a hoppy beer louder is to make it bigger, and a brewery adding this much aroma would ordinarily let the alcohol climb along with it. Green Cheek left the strength exactly where it was and spent the increase entirely on hops. Nothing structural changed. The color stays, in the brewery's own words, extra pale. Only the intensity moved.

Saturation is a photo-editing term and it is being used accurately here, which is a rarer thing in beer copy than it ought to be.

Nelson and Motueka are an all-New Zealand pairing that pull in slightly different directions. Nelson is the variety people describe in wine terms, all white grape and gooseberry. Motueka is brighter and more citric, lime-leaning, with a herbal edge that keeps it from reading as plain lemon. Loading both hard onto a 5.4 percent base leaves very little malt standing in the way of either.

Double dry-hopping is also worth noting at this strength. The technique normally gets reserved for IPAs and up, where there is more beer to absorb it. Applying it to a pale ale is a bet that you can have IPA-grade aroma in something you can reasonably have two of.

Green Cheek's tasting notes are big passionfruit, Mamba mango fruit chews and fresh kiwi.

High-Res Liquid Photograph is available now at Green Cheek's taprooms.

Editor’s Take

Breweries have tried a great many ways to tell you that this is the bigger one. Double. Imperial. Triple. DDH. A roman numeral. An exclamation mark, or four. Green Cheek has gone with High-Res, which may be the first label in the whole genre that actually describes what happened. The beer is not stronger. It is not bigger. It is the same 5.4 percent picture with more pixels in it, and anyone who has ever opened a photo that was saved too small knows precisely what the upgrade is meant to feel like.

It also quietly settles an argument the category keeps having with itself. More hops does not have to mean more alcohol. It just usually does, because alcohol is the easier thing to put on a shelf talker. Here is a pale ale that got considerably louder while standing perfectly still.

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.

High-Res Liquid Photograph Turns the Hops Up, Not the ABV

Green Cheek already brews a beer called Liquid Photograph. This one is the same 5.4 percent picture with more information in it, loaded harder on Nelson and Motueka and no stronger for it.

Source & Editorial