Hop kief is not a phrase that turns up on many ingredient lists. It turns up on this one.

X-Raying Rakau is the newest entry in North Park Beer Co.'s "X-Raying" series, a triple dry-hopped Hazy Double IPA at 8.5 percent ABV. The hop bill runs to five entries: Citra, Citra Cryo, Nelson Sauvin, Rakau, and Rakau Hop Kief.

That last one is worth a pause. Kief is a term borrowed from cannabis, where it describes the resin glands sifted loose from the plant and gathered as a powder. Hops and cannabis belong to the same botanical family, and hops store their aromatic oils in much the same way, in the yellow lupulin packed at the base of each cone. Hop kief is that material separated out and concentrated. In function it is a close relative of the Cryo powder sitting two slots up the same list. What is new is the name.

The series has a method

Last month's X-Raying Citra took one American hop and ran it through the beer in three processed forms at once. This release turns the same equipment toward the other side of the world. Rakau and Nelson Sauvin are both New Zealand varieties, and between them they cover a good deal of what that country's hops are known for. Rakau leans toward stone fruit. Nelson Sauvin is the one brewers reach for when they want white grape rather than citrus.

North Park describes notes of apricot, honey mango, and a splash of melon and key lime. The apricot is the note that tracks most directly back to Rakau, and the key lime sits at the sharper end of what Citra and its cryo form tend to contribute. The brewery's own framing is that these five hops make up the bones of the beer, which is the kind of pun a series built on X-rays has earned the right to make.

The packaging holds the series line: a skeleton at the center of a radiating teal burst, the same visual language the Citra entry used in August.

X-Raying Rakau ships within California or can be collected at any of the brewery's three San Diego locations.

Editor’s Take

For about a century the hop trade described its own product in the driest terms available. Alpha acids, cohumulone percentages, total oil content - a spreadsheet with a plant attached. Meanwhile, an adjacent industry working on a closely related plant had spent the same century developing a much better vocabulary for the same physical material. Kief is one of those words. It means the resin dust sifted off the plant, it has been in steady use for generations, and it has now turned up on the side of a Double IPA can in San Diego as though it had always lived there.\n\nThe part I enjoy is that this is not marketing dressed up as science. It is the reverse. Kief is a plain, unfussy word for a thing the beer industry had previously insisted on calling a concentrated lupulin fraction, which is four syllables longer and tells you less. The two plants are cousins. They keep the good stuff in the same kind of gland. Someone finally said so on a label, and what came out the other end is a beer the brewery says tastes of apricot and key lime.

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.

X-Raying Rakau Puts Hop Kief on the Ingredient List

North Park's hazy series moves on from Citra and points the machine at New Zealand. The new entry lists Rakau Hop Kief among its five hops, which is not a phrase most labels have had to explain yet.

The series has a method

Source & Editorial