Fresh hop season at Double Mountain starts with a drive. For Killer Green, the brewery says its crew hustled out to the Willamette Valley, picked out their stash of wet hops, and got them into the kettle and hop back as fast as they could manage.

Roughly 150 pounds per batch went into the hop back. That vessel sits between the kettle and the chiller, packed with whole cones, and the hot wort runs through it on the way past. It is a brief, forceful kind of contact, and it is close to the opposite of what the brewery did with Killer Red, where the hops went into cold finished beer in the brite tank and sat there. Same season, same farms, two entirely different points in the process to spend the harvest.

The style target is stated plainly. Double Mountain calls the beer an ode to a big, dank, aggressively balanced West Coast IPA, and describes the outcome as everything the brewery likes about a Northwest IPA - citrus, pine and grapefruit - only, in its words, more and stickier.

The label backs that up with numbers. Killer Green lands at 7.3 percent ABV and 80 BU, which is a real bitterness figure rather than a decorative one, and a useful signal of where this beer sits relative to the softer, hazier end of the category. Hop back additions contribute aroma and flavor more than raw bitterness, so the 80 is coming from the bittering charge in the kettle, with the wet cones layered over the top of it.

That combination is the West Coast argument in miniature. A hazy IPA sets out to make hop character arrive without any edge attached to it. This does the reverse, keeping the bite and using the fresh-hop charge to give it lift rather than to smooth it away. For anyone whose usual IPA order has gone soft and orange over the last few years, this is the other tradition, still running.

Killer Green is out now on tap and in refillable 500 ml bottles across the Pacific Northwest, and at Double Mountain's taprooms in Hood River and in the Woodstock and Overlook neighborhoods of Portland. It is one of four fresh hop beers the brewery released this year, alongside Killer Red, Fresh Hop Iowa Bar Fight and a returning Killer Lion. The window is the usual one: Double Mountain's own advice is to come get them while they are fresh.

Editor’s Take

Double Mountain calls this one an ode to a big, dank, aggressively balanced West Coast IPA, and I have been turning that middle phrase over for a while now. Aggressively balanced. Balance is the one quality in brewing that is supposed to arrive quietly, the thing you notice by its absence, and here it is being delivered at volume with its sleeves rolled up. It should not work as a description. It works completely. Anyone who has had a proper Northwest IPA knows precisely the beer being described, which is a tidy reminder that spec sheets have never been very good at this and brewers talking like people usually are.

The rest of the copy gives up on adjectives entirely and just goes to capitals. Citrus, pine and grapefruit, says the brewery, and then: just MORE. And STICKIER. There is a whole industry of tasting-note vocabulary built to avoid writing that sentence, and not one word of it would have landed better.

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.

Killer Green Starts With a Drive Out to the Willamette Valley

Double Mountain's West Coast entry in this year's fresh hop run takes roughly 150 pounds of wet cones per batch through the hop back, on the hot side, at 80 BU. The brewery's own summary: more, and stickier.

Source & Editorial