Dr. Punk Is Named for the Woman Who Grows Its Riwaka

A hazy IPA hopped only with Riwaka, a New Zealand variety as difficult to grow as it is prized. It is named for the plant scientist who took that on, and Working Draft was her first brewery customer.

Style: Hazy IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-15
ABV: N/A
Working Draft Beer Company (Madison, WI)

Working Draft Beer Company was the first brewery to sign a hop contract with Hop Revolution. Over the eight years since, the Madison brewery says more than 90 percent of the New Zealand hops it has used have come from that single farm. Dr. Punk is the beer named for the woman who built it.

The beer itself is a hazy IPA brewed with 2-row barley and flaked oats, hopped exclusively with Riwaka. Working Draft has not published an ABV.

Hop Revolution's founder is Dr. Susan Wheeler, a plant scientist who spent most of her career in wine. The brewery's account comes from someone who met her around 2014 while working at Wisconsin Brewing Company, and it describes a scientist who grew bored with the New Zealand wine industry's focus on a handful of varietals and decided hops would be more interesting work. So she started her own hop company. Working Draft says the New Zealand hop business was not welcoming to newcomers at the time, and that she pushed ahead regardless to build what is now one of the largest independent hop farms in the country.

Riwaka is where the farm and the beer meet. The variety is prized for a punchy tropical fruit character, and it is equally well known for being temperamental, difficult to grow and often low yielding. Wheeler was specifically interested in finding better ways to grow it.

That reputation usually determines how a hop gets used. A variety that is scarce and unpredictable tends to appear as a supporting note inside a blend, where a small quantity can be stretched across a larger beer. Building an entire recipe on it is a different proposition. It depends on a grower willing to fight the plant for the yield, which is more or less the relationship Working Draft is describing.

The brewery characterizes Riwaka as a blend of tropical fruit like kiwi and passionfruit, an almost savory sulfur note reminiscent of sesame oil, and the grassy quality common to New Zealand hops. The 2-row and oat base is built to carry that: flaked oats add body and softness, which gives an aggressively aromatic single hop something to sit in rather than sit on top of.

The name comes from Wheeler as well. Working Draft says she has lived the punk ethos throughout her life and wore pink liberty spikes in her youth, and that Dr. Punk follows directly from it. The brewery dedicates the beer to people who march to the beat of their own drum.

Working Draft is also unusually direct about how the beer lands. It says Dr. Punk is divisive, and that drinkers either love it or hate it, framing that as fitting for the name rather than as a problem to be solved. Release notes do not often make room for the possibility that a reader will not enjoy the beer.

Dr. Punk appears in the current lineup at the brewery's taproom on East Wilson Street in Madison.

Editor’s Take

Somewhere in the description of a tropical hazy IPA, between the kiwi and the passionfruit, sits the phrase sesame oil. Not as a warning. As a selling point. Riwaka carries a savory, almost sulfurous note that most hop marketing would quietly decline to mention, and Working Draft has printed it right next to the fruit. It is also not the contradiction it looks like. Sulfur compounds are a large part of why hops smell like passionfruit and grapefruit in the first place, so the savory edge and the tropical punch are the same chemistry arriving from two directions at once. One of those directions just happens to smell like a wok.

The other thing worth admiring is that nobody here is pretending everyone will enjoy it. The brewery says the beer is divisive and then simply leaves it there. Think about what it is named after: a scientist who left wine because a handful of varietals stopped being interesting, started a hop farm in an industry that was not expecting her, and then picked the most temperamental variety on the board to specialize in. A beer carrying that name would be faintly ridiculous if it had been engineered to please everybody. It is single-hopped with a low-yielding plant that fights back, and the brewery's own notes put sesame oil and kiwi in the same sentence. Of course it splits the room. Letting a beer be exactly what it is remains an underrated move.

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.