Killer Red never meets its fresh hops in the kettle. Double Mountain packed more than 400 pounds of wet Centennial into oversized hop sacks, lowered them into the brite tank, and left the finished beer to marinate on top of them.

It is the first of four fresh hop beers the Hood River brewery has brought out this year, and by its own account always the first one out of the gate. The Centennial came from Crosby Hop Farms in the Willamette Valley. Double Mountain describes the result as resinous citrus and pine, carrying what it calls the sticky, green, fresh-hop goodness the brewery looks for this time of year.

The brite tank is the detail worth sitting with. It is the last vessel a beer passes through, after fermentation has finished and the temperature has come down, which puts this addition much closer to a dry hop than to anything done on the hot side. There is no boil to drive off the volatile oils that make a wet cone worth hauling across the state in the first place. What the hops give up, they give up slowly, into cold beer, over time. Bitterness largely stays behind. Aroma does not.

The base is a red ale, and the label says so plainly: Fresh Hop IRA. Double Mountain keeps a year-round IRA in its lineup, an India Red Ale at 6.5 percent that the brewery builds on Brewer's Gold in the kettle with Brewer's Gold and Simcoe in the hop back, finished with Kolsch yeast and pitched at drinkers of ambers and IPAs alike. Killer Red arrives at 7.0 percent and 70 BU. Swapping the fresh-hop charge onto that frame is a different proposition than laying it over a pale malt bill, because there is caramel and red fruit underneath it rather than open space.

Double Mountain frames the whole season as a race against the clock, getting cones from the farm into the kettle, hop back or brite tank as fast as the crew can manage. The brewery's line for it is that fresh hop beers capture a moment in time.

Killer Red is pouring now at the original Hood River taproom and at the two Portland taprooms in the Woodstock and Overlook neighborhoods, and it is available on tap and in refillable 500 ml bottles across the Pacific Northwest. Those bottles are worth a word of their own: Double Mountain packages in returnable glass that gets sorted, washed and refilled rather than recycled, and puts its running total at just under 2.9 million refillable bottles sold to date. Empties come back at any Bottle Drop location or at a taproom, where 24 of them earns six dollars off the next visit.

Editor’s Take

Four hundred pounds of hops, bagged up and lowered into a tank of finished beer to sit there and leach. Strip away the stainless and the pumps and what Double Mountain has built is a tea bag. An enormous, sopping, faintly agricultural tea bag, and I mean that with real affection - it is also the gentlest possible way to treat a cone that was on a bine the day before. Nothing boils it. Nothing scorches it. The beer just leans on it for a while.

What I like is where all that Centennial lands. Centennial is the elder statesman of American hops, the grapefruit-and-pine one that everything hazy spent the last decade running away from, and here it gets dropped onto a red ale rather than a pale one. That means caramel and toasted malt and a bit of red fruit sitting underneath, pushing back. A wet grapefruit note has something to argue with instead of simply arriving unopposed. Put it next to anything that has spent time over charcoal - a burger with the edges gone crisp, a plate of grilled sausage - and the resin and the char should get along nicely.

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 Red Steeps on 400 Pounds of Wet Centennial in the Brite Tank

The first of Double Mountain's four fresh hop beers this year takes its Centennial cold and late, in sacks lowered into the brite tank. A red ale malt base underneath, and 400-plus pounds of wet hops on top of it.

Source & Editorial