Killer Lion Comes Back With Only the Hop Timing Changed

Off the fresh hop roster for several seasons, Killer Lion returns with its malt bill and hopping regimen left where they were. The changes are all in dose and timing, over fresh Mosaic out of Mt. Angel Farm.

Style: Fresh Hop IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-15
ABV: N/A
Double Mountain Brewery & Cidery (Hood River, OR)

Not every returning beer has been away for a measurable reason. Killer Lion has: Double Mountain says it has not brewed this one in a hot minute, and a fresh hop beer can only come back during the few weeks a year the hops exist in the form the recipe needs. A hiatus here is counted in harvests, not months.

It is back for 2026 as one of four fresh hop beers in the brewery's annual Killers run. The fresh hops are Mosaic, out of Mt. Angel Farm and sourced through Coleman Hops, and Double Mountain credits them with ripe tropical and sticky citrus notes.

What the brewery did not do is more interesting than what it did. Double Mountain says it kept the malt bill and the hopping regimen familiar, and confined its changes to hop amounts and timing. That is a narrow set of levers to work with on a beer being revived after several years away, and it is also the correct set for this particular problem. Wet hops are unkilned and carry most of their original moisture, which makes them bulkier and less predictable than the pellets a brewery works with the rest of the year. Oil content shifts with the field and the week it was picked. When the ingredient is the variable, dose and timing are where the adjustments belong, and leaving the recipe underneath it alone is what makes the comparison to previous versions mean anything.

Double Mountain has not published an ABV for this year's batch, and Killer Lion does not hold a listing in the brewery's standing beer lineup.

The wider framing from the brewery is that fresh hop beers capture a moment in time, which is a fair description of the logistics as much as the flavor. Double Mountain notes it is close enough to the Willamette Valley farms to get out into the fields and meet the growers, and calls the resulting beers little labors of love.

Killer Lion is pouring now at the Hood River taproom and at the Woodstock and Overlook taprooms in Portland, with Double Mountain beer also distributed on tap and in refillable bottles across the Pacific Northwest. One scheduling note for anyone planning a visit: all Double Mountain locations are closed Tuesday, September 22 for the company's annual campout, reopening Wednesday, September 23 at 4 p.m.

Editor’s Take

Mosaic has spent the past decade as one of the most reached-for hops in American brewing, which means most of us have tasted it several hundred times and almost none of us have ever met it. What arrives at a brewery is a vacuum-sealed brick of green pellets, kilned and milled and stabilized months earlier, engineered to taste the same in March as it did in September. That is a genuine achievement and also a small act of taxidermy.

Killer Lion gets the other version. Cones off a bine at Mt. Angel Farm, still wet, still carrying whatever that particular field did in whatever kind of summer it just had, in a beer within hours. Double Mountain reports ripe tropical and sticky citrus, and the interesting thing is that nobody, including the brewery, could have promised that in advance with any precision. Fresh hop beer is the one corner of a famously controlled craft where the ingredient shows up and tells you what it brought. Getting a few weeks a year to drink the unstabilised original of a hop you thought you already knew seems to me a thoroughly good reason to make the drive to Hood River.

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.