Iowa Bar Fight has now been given the wet-hop treatment four years running, and this year Double Mountain went backwards to move it forward. The brewery says it returned to the original recipe, brought Citra and Simcoe back into the mix, and then took what it cheerfully calls a few liberties with the hopping.

The beer is a collaboration with Solera Brewery, up the road in Parkdale, and it has been a fixture in Double Mountain's lineup long enough to hold a year-round slot of its own. The name comes from the Midwest roots shared by Double Mountain founder Matt Swihart and Solera co-founder Jason Kahler. On its own page for the beer, Double Mountain describes the idea as old dirt roads getting paved and houses going up in cornfields, and lands on a line about sometimes eating the bar and other times the bar eating you.

The fresh hops for this year's version are Strata, sourced from Coleman Hops through Greenleaf Farm. That choice is more deliberate than it first appears. The standing, year-round Iowa Bar Fight already runs Strata through its hop back, in dried form, alongside Citra and Mosaic in the kettle. Putting Strata back in as the fresh-hop charge means the beer is reaching for the same variety it already knows, just caught at a completely different moment. Strata is an Oregon-bred variety, so the trip from the Willamette Valley to a Hood River kettle is about as short as a hop's journey gets.

Double Mountain describes the cones arriving sweaty, sticky and ready to party, and the finished beer as soft, round, complex and smooth, with what the brewery calls a little bit of an "everything gon' be irie" thing going on. That is a notably relaxed set of descriptors for a fresh hop beer, most of which are sold on intensity. The label reads 6.4 percent ABV and 60 BU, which is the most modest bitterness figure among this year's four and squares with the softer framing.

Fresh Hop Iowa Bar Fight is out now on draft and in refillable 500 ml bottles, at Double Mountain's Hood River taproom and its two Portland taprooms in the Woodstock and Overlook neighborhoods, and through the brewery's Pacific Northwest distribution. It joins Killer Red, Killer Green and a returning Killer Lion in this year's fresh hop run.

Editor’s Take

A beer called Iowa Bar Fight arrives, and the brewery's summary of how it tastes is that it has a little bit of an everything gon' be irie thing going on. I have read that sentence several times now and it gets better each pass. Whatever fight was being had in the name, it appears to have been settled amicably some time ago.

The name itself is quieter than it looks, too. Double Mountain's own page for the beer explains it is about the Midwest both founders came from - Matt Swihart at Double Mountain and Jason Kahler at Solera - and specifically about old dirt roads getting paved and houses going up in cornfields. Sometimes you eat the bar, the brewery writes, other times the bar eats you. That is a surprisingly wistful thing to find under a name that sounds like a broken pool cue, and it is the sort of detail that only ever turns up when two people who have known each other a long time are making something together.

What carries it is the Strata. A hop bred in Oregon, grown in Oregon, going into an Oregon beer without ever being dried, kilned or baled first - the shortest possible distance between a field and a glass, and the reason the whole exhausting three weeks of fresh hop season exists. The brewery says the cones turned up sweaty, sticky and ready to party. Hard to ask more of a hop than that.

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 Iowa Bar Fight Takes Its Strata Wet This Year

The fourth wet-hop pass at Double Mountain and Solera's long-running collaboration goes back to the original recipe, pulls Citra and Simcoe in behind it, and takes its Strata straight off the bine rather than out of a bag.

Source & Editorial