Brasserie du Bas-Canada marked Oktoberfest by brewing with a German brewery. The beer they made together is not remotely a lager.

Hypa X Sudden Death is an India Pale Ale at 6.5 percent ABV, brewed with Sudden Death Brewing Co. of Lubeck and released online this morning in 473 ml cans, with a limit of 24 cans per person. The Gatineau brewery introduces it as a short break from lager, and says it pushed the Oktoberfest concept further by making the collaboration a heavily hopped one.

The beer is built on an existing recipe. Hypa is a running series at Bas-Canada, and the brewery says it took that base and added still more hops on top of it. This is a separate beer from Hypa #2, which the brewery brought back earlier in the same week - same series, different collaborator, and a completely different hop bill.

That bill is Citra, Nelson Sauvin and Southern Cross, plus Nelson Sauvin Hop Kief. The last of those is the detail worth explaining. Kief refers to concentrated lupulin, the resin glands sieved away from the leafy material of the hop cone. Brewing with the concentrate delivers a heavier load of the compounds that carry aroma and flavor without the corresponding volume of plant matter, which is how a brewery pushes intensity past the point where whole hops start contributing grassiness instead.

So Nelson Sauvin appears twice, in two forms. Nelson is a New Zealand variety with a distinctive white-wine character, frequently described in terms of gooseberry and Sauvignon Blanc, and it is assertive enough that most breweries use it as an accent. Doubling it, once whole and once as concentrate, is a clear statement of where the beer is meant to sit. Southern Cross is also a New Zealand hop, and Citra supplies the citrus and tropical weight underneath.

The can carries the series artwork - an eye set inside a triangle over a purple and green gradient - and reads Gatineau, Quebec X Lubeck, Deutschland around the rim, with both breweries' marks at the base.

Cans went on sale at 11 a.m. today at bascanada.beer, released from the Hautes-Plaines site, with a week to collect orders. Both the Gatineau and Hautes-Plaines tasting rooms are open, with Oktoberfest menus running through Sunday.

Editor’s Take

Consider the sequence of decisions. It is Oktoberfest. You are releasing four lagers. You get in touch with an actual German brewery, in Lubeck, to mark the occasion properly. And the beer the two of you make together is a 6.5 percent India Pale Ale hopped to the gills with Citra and New Zealand fruit. Bas-Canada introduces it with the phrase a little break from lager, which is the understatement of the release.

The detail I keep circling is Nelson Sauvin turning up twice on the same bill - once as a hop and once as kief, the concentrated lupulin. That is not redundancy, it is emphasis. Nelson is the hop that tastes like someone opened a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the room, all gooseberry and cut grass and white wine, and it is divisive precisely because it does not taste much like beer. Using it twice, in two forms, is a brewery deciding the answer to too much Nelson Sauvin is more Nelson Sauvin.

Set that next to Southern Cross and Citra and you have a beer pulling hard toward the southern hemisphere on the one weekend of the year built around Bavaria. Somewhere in Lubeck, someone is drinking this with a sausage. Good for them.

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.

Hypa X Sudden Death Uses Nelson Sauvin Twice, in Two Different Forms

A German collaboration in an Oktoberfest release, and it is not a lager. Bas-Canada takes the base of its Hypa series and loads it with Citra, Southern Cross and Nelson Sauvin - the last of those twice, once as concentrate.

Source & Editorial