Gardiens Sacrés Runs Five New Zealand Hops at 11.3 Percent

A new Quadruple IPA built on Nectaron, Peacharine, Rakau, Waimea and Motueka - five New Zealand varieties and nothing else. The brewery says the 11.3 percent never shows up, which is the whole trick of the style.

Style: Quadruple IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-17
ABV: 11.3%
Brasserie du Bas-Canada (Gatineau, QC)

An 11.3 percent beer that the brewery says carries no trace of alcohol is either a tall claim or the entire point of the style. Brasserie du Bas-Canada is going with the latter.

Gardiens Sacrés is a new Quadruple IPA, released online this morning as the strongest can in the Gatineau brewery's seven-beer Oktoberfest lineup. It comes in 473 ml cans with a limit of 24 per person.

The hop bill is the defining decision. Bas-Canada used five New Zealand cultivars - Nectaron, Peacharine, Rakau, Waimea and Motueka - and nothing from outside the country. New Zealand varieties share a recognizable family character, tending toward white wine, gooseberry, stone fruit and a bright citrus edge rather than the resinous or dank register of many American hops. Building a beer from five of them, with no American or European hop to broaden the base, keeps the whole beer inside that one register.

The strength puts it in unusual company. Quadruple IPA is not a formally defined style so much as a marker for the far end of the category, and at 11.3 percent this sits at a strength normally occupied by barleywines. The difference is what the beer is organized around. A barleywine is built on malt and sweetness, while this is built to be, in the brewery's words, ultra saturated in hops.

That is also what makes the brewery's claim about the alcohol worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. Hiding that much strength is less about hop quantity than about attenuation and balance, and it is the specific thing this style either achieves or does not.

The can was illustrated by the artist Alexandre Mercier, whom the brewery credits directly in the release notes.

Cans went on sale online at 11 a.m. today at bascanada.beer, released from the Hautes-Plaines site, with a week allowed to collect orders. Both tasting rooms are open through the weekend, with Oktoberfest menus and a $30 four-lager tasting package running September 17 to 20.

Editor’s Take

Five New Zealand hops and not one from anywhere else. That is the part that makes this more than a strength contest. New Zealand hop breeding has spent decades on a particular register - white wine, gooseberry, stone fruit, crushed citrus leaf - and a brewery going single-origin across five cultivars is treating the country as a flavor palette rather than raiding it for one famous name and calling it a day.

Then there is the claim. Bas-Canada says there is no trace of alcohol in an 11.3 percent beer, which sounds like marketing until you consider what it actually demands. At that strength you are somewhere near barleywine, and everything about the base beer wants to announce itself as warm and sweet. Burying that under hops is not a matter of adding more hops, it is a matter of building a beer dry enough and saturated enough that the alcohol has nowhere to stand. When it works, it is quietly alarming - the glass empties faster than it has any business doing.

It is called Sacred Guardians and it is the strongest can in the release. I would treat the twenty-four can purchase limit as theoretical.

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.