Petit Chicago Lists Three Hops, and All Three Are Citra

The hop bill lists Citra three times over - classic pellets, Cryo and Incognito - all drawn from the brewery's 2025 selection. Three formats of one variety, each doing a slightly different job in the tank.

• Style: India Pale Ale
• Release Date: 2026-09-15
• ABV: 6.5%
• Brasserie du Bas-Canada (Gatineau, QC)

The hop bill on Petit Chicago lists three entries. All three of them are Citra.

Brasserie du Bas-Canada put the India Pale Ale back on sale this morning, brewed with Citra in what the brewery calls its classic form, alongside Citra Cryo and Citra Incognito. Bas-Canada says the beer showcases its 2025 Citra selection from Yakima Chief Hops, and that Petit Chicago is by now a classic with a great deal of Citra behind it. The beer is 6.5 percent ABV in 473 ml cans, with a limit of 24 cans per person.

The three formats are not a flourish. They are separate products made from the same plant, and each one behaves differently once it reaches the beer.

Standard pellets are the familiar version: whole cones dried, milled and pressed, carrying the lupulin glands along with the leaf material around them. Cryo is the same crop put through a cryogenic separation that concentrates the lupulin and leaves most of that leaf behind. The result runs to roughly twice the resin content of conventional pellets and is dosed at about half the weight, which lets a brewer push aroma hard without dragging in the vegetal, drying character that heavy hopping can bring. Incognito is a liquid hop concentrate, flowable at room temperature and typically dosed into the whirlpool. It delivers varietal flavor with far less process loss, since hop material soaks up a meaningful amount of beer on its way out and a liquid does not.

Used together, they are three routes to the same variety's character, entering at different points and with different trade-offs. That is the case for a beer that is effectively single-hop and still lists three hops.

Naming the crop year is the other half of it. Hop lots vary from season to season and field to field, and brewers who care about that variation select specific lots rather than take whatever arrives. By pointing at a 2025 selection, Bas-Canada is placing this batch on a particular harvest rather than on the variety in general.

Petit Chicago sits among the beers on the brewery's own site rather than turning up as a one-off return. Cans went on sale online at 11 a.m. today through bascanada.beer, packed at the Gatineau brewery rather than the Hautes-Plaines location. Orders can be collected within the week, and the Gatineau tasting room is open today. It is one of three beers in this release, alongside Hypa #2 and Fuegitos.