Name: Topaz
Brand: South Lake Brewing Company
Availability: InStock

Naming a beer after the brewery dog is a well-worn move. Naming it after the brewery dog and an Australian hop variety at the same time takes a little more planning.

South Lake Brewing Company's new Topaz is an Australian-style pale ale at 5.2 percent ABV, brewed in honor of the brewery's chocolate lab, also named Topaz. It is on tap now at both locations.

The hop of the same name is real and central to the recipe. Topaz is an Australian variety bred in Victoria, a high-alpha hop with a resinous, grassy character that has historically seen as much use for bittering as for aroma. South Lake has paired it with Galaxy, the best-known Australian hop of the modern era and the source of most of the passionfruit in the Southern Hemisphere's reputation. The brewery lists floral and wood aromas leading into pine, lychee, and passion fruit with a citrus undercurrent.

Those notes split cleanly between the two hops. The wood and pine are Topaz territory; the passionfruit and lychee are Galaxy doing what Galaxy does. It is a useful pairing, because Topaz on its own can read as austere, and Galaxy is generous enough to fill in around it.

The grain bill is deliberately unobtrusive - South Lake describes it as clean and restrained, hopped, in their phrasing, to the hilt. That is orthodox for the style. Australian pale ale is built to be a hop delivery system at a sessionable strength, and the crisp finish the brewery is describing depends on the malt staying out of the conversation.

Topaz is pouring at the Brewery on Lake Tahoe Boulevard and at The Libation Lodge in Stateline.

Editor’s Take

There is a whole genre of brewery dog beer, and most of it is a label with a good boy on it and a perfectly ordinary pale ale behind it. This one did the harder version of the joke. The dog is called Topaz, Topaz is an Australian hop, so the beer is an Australian pale ale hopped with Topaz - the pun is load-bearing all the way down to the recipe. Somebody at South Lake worked out that their lab shared a name with a Victorian hop variety and then went and brewed the entire beer that observation implied. That is a commitment I can respect.

It helps that Topaz the hop is a genuinely interesting thing to build around rather than a convenient coincidence. It is a high-alpha variety that tends to run grassy and resinous on its own, and the brewery has paired it with Galaxy, which is the one Australian hop everybody knows and which brings the passionfruit. The pine and the lychee in South Lake's notes are those two varieties doing their separate jobs in the same glass. Pair it with something salty and fried - the brewery's own food truck does a chicken tender sandwich, and a crisp 5.2 percent pale ale with a bitter edge is exactly the right thing to put next to that.

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.

Topaz Is Named for the Brew Dog and the Hop, Both

South Lake's brew dog is a chocolate lab named Topaz. So is an Australian hop. The brewery has built a pale ale that answers to both, pairing Topaz with Galaxy over a deliberately plain grain bill.

Source & Editorial