Ripple Runs Two Hop Extracts Under One Showcase Hop

A West Coast IPA with a New Zealand farm hop out front and two concentrated hop products working underneath it. Twin Elephant is using the structure to keep a pile of mango and citrus from going soft.

Style: West Coast IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-23
ABV: 7%
Twin Elephant Brewing Company (Chatham, NJ)

Twin Elephant's newest West Coast IPA is a good illustration of how a modern hop bill actually gets assembled. Ripple runs at 7 percent, and it draws on four hop additions in three genuinely different physical forms.

The showcase is Eggers Special, from the independent Eggers farm in New Zealand's Upper Moutere Valley. The brewery puts it front and center and credits it with citrus, tropical fruit, mango and a dank green character. Beneath that sit NY Triumph HOPSAUCE, Simcoe, and Centennial CO2 extract, which the Chatham, New Jersey brewery says contribute grapefruit, citrus peel, light pine and resin.

The extracts are the story

Two of those four are concentrates rather than cones or pellets. HOPSAUCE is a flowable CO2 extract from the New York Hop Guild, made for kettle and whirlpool additions, here in the NY Triumph variety - a hop released by the USDA breeding program in 2019 that runs from fruity to almost noble depending on how it is used. The Centennial is likewise a CO2 extract rather than the whole hop.

The practical difference is what gets left out. An extract carries the hop's aromatic and bittering compounds without the vegetal material, so a brewer can push intensity without the grassy edge that heavy dry-hopping can introduce, and without losing beer to a kettle full of saturated plant matter. Running two of them underneath a whole-hop Simcoe charge is a way of building a firm, classic bitterness and a resinous backbone as deliberate structure rather than as a byproduct.

That structure is what Twin Elephant says the beer needs. The brewery's stated aim is to keep all that mango and tropical fruit from going soft or sweet, which is the perennial risk when a fruit-forward hop leads an IPA. It describes the result as bright and aromatic up front with mango, lime, citrus and grapefruit, then turning greener and danker into a crisp, firm bitterness.

That is a fairly specific shape, and it is the shape a West Coast IPA is supposed to have: fruit on the nose, a dry and bitter landing, no lingering sweetness. A beer built to finish that cleanly would hold its own against something rich off a grill, or against the chili heat that a softer, sweeter IPA tends to lose to.

Ripple is pouring now at Twin Elephant's taproom at 13 Watchung Avenue in Chatham, with an Eggers Special four-pack listed as an upcoming release.

Editor’s Take

Four hop additions, and only one of them is a hop in the shape most people picture. Eggers Special is the headliner. Simcoe arrives the traditional way. The other two - NY Triumph HOPSAUCE and Centennial CO2 extract - are concentrates, hop oil pulled out of the cone and added as a liquid, which means Twin Elephant is dosing aroma and bitterness from a bottle rather than a bale.

There is an old assumption that extract is the cheap shortcut, the thing you reach for when you cannot afford the real article. That has not been true for a while. A CO2 extract is just the aromatic fraction of the hop with the plant matter left behind, and leaving the plant matter behind is frequently the entire objective - no vegetal drag, no beer soaked up and thrown out with the trub. The interesting part here is that the brewery did not go all in on either approach. It put a named single-farm hop out front for character, whole Simcoe in for the pine and grapefruit spine, and two concentrates underneath to hold the shape. That is a brewer using three different tools because they each do one thing well, which is less romantic than a wall of cones and considerably better engineering.

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.