Columbus Cauldron Uses One Hop, Arriving in Six Different Forms

One hop variety, six different physical forms of it, spread across every stage of the brew. Cellar West has built an IPA that swaps the usual hop blend for a study in how the same plant behaves depending on how it arrives.

Style: IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-25
ABV: 6.8%
Cellar West Brewery (Lafayette, CO)

Most IPAs are a committee of hops. This one is a single variety wearing six different outfits.

Cellar West Brewery releases Columbus Cauldron on Friday, September 25, a 6.8% IPA arriving in cans and on draught at both the Lafayette and Erie taprooms when doors open at 3pm. Every hop addition in it is Columbus. What changes is the form that Columbus takes, and where in the process it goes in.

Six forms, one variety

The brewery lays out the full sequence:

Whole leaf hops in the mash

Pellets and CO2 extract in the kettle

Cryo and Hop Hash in the fermenter

Terpene extracts alongside them

Those are not interchangeable products. Whole cones and pellets are the hop more or less intact, plant matter and all, and they behave the way hops traditionally have in a mash and a boil. A CO2 extract strips out the resins and oils and leaves the vegetal material behind, which lets a brewer push bitterness and aroma without the grassy edge that comes with a lot of physical hop in the vessel. Cryo is lupulin powder, the yellow glandular material concentrated out of the cone where most of the oil actually lives. Hop Hash is the resinous residue that collects during pelletizing, a byproduct that is unusually dense in the sticky compounds. Terpene extracts are further down the same road again, closer to pure aromatic compound than to a plant.

Put them in that order and a pattern shows up. The whole-leaf and pellet additions come early, where heat and time extract bitterness. The concentrated forms arrive late and cold, in the fermenter, where aroma survives. The same hop is being asked for a different job at each stage.

What Columbus brings

Columbus is one of the old reliable American high-alpha hops, a member of the group usually filed alongside Chinook and Centennial, and it has long been a workhorse for bittering rather than a headliner. Building an entire beer on it is a way of finding out what it does when it is not in a supporting role.

Cellar West describes the result as a delicious expression of the variety, with layered notes of tropical flowers, fresh citrus and dank cannabis. That last descriptor is standard vocabulary for this hop family, and Columbus in particular has the resinous, assertive character that earns it. Those are the brewery's notes rather than a verdict, but they are consistent with what the variety is known for.

The resinous end of that profile tends to want something with fat and salt against it. A beer built this far into pine and citrus resin would hold up to a plate of fried chicken or a sharp aged cheddar better than it would to anything delicate.

There is a small pleasure in where this comes from. Cellar West was founded in 2016 in a North Boulder garage, built on saison and barrel-aged farmhouse ale, and it collected a Great American Beer Festival medal and a spot on BeerAdvocate's best new breweries list in its first year. A maximalist single-hop IPA is some distance from a barrel of farmhouse ale. It is recognizably the same curiosity pointed at a different target.

Columbus Cauldron pours Friday from 3pm in Lafayette and Erie, in cans and on draught.

Editor’s Take

Six forms of one hop is the sort of thing that sounds like a stunt until you look at where each one goes. Whole leaf in the mash. Pellets and CO2 extract in the kettle. Cryo and Hop Hash in the fermenter. Terpene extract somewhere in there too. That is not a brewer showing off, that is a brewer who has noticed that Columbus tastes like several different things depending on what you do to it, and who has declined to pick just one.

The usual way to build an IPA is to assemble a committee - a bittering hop, an aroma hop, a fashionable hop with a name from a catalogue - and hope they agree on something. Cellar West has gone the other direction and cast a single hop in every part. The flavour notes the brewery lists run from tropical flowers to fresh citrus to dank cannabis, which sounds like a blend and is instead one variety being asked to show its whole range.

The detail that makes it funnier is whose brewery this is. Cellar West started in a garage making saison and barrel-aged farmhouse ale, the patient end of brewing, where the interesting thing happens over months in wood. This is the same operation deciding to see how much Columbus can be put into one tank before something gives. Both impulses come from the same place, really: find one thing, then find out everything it does.

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.