Star Chamber Puts Green Tea Between the Papaya and the Coconut

Green tea is not a common beer ingredient. It turns up occasionally in saisons and the odd summer ale, usually as a light aromatic lift, and almost never as one of three headline additions. Hudson Valley Brewery has built Star Chamber around it, alongside papaya and coconut, and the combination is the reason this one is worth a second look.

The Sour IPA is back in the brewery's cooler and online shop at 7 percent, part of a three-beer restock out of Beacon, New York. Hudson Valley calls it one of its favorite flavor combinations, and files it among the classics in its sour lineup rather than as a new recipe.

The brewery says the three ingredients together make the beer taste like mango lassi or a tropical fruit salad. Those are two fairly different destinations, and the gap between them is instructive. A fruit salad is bright and separable, each piece keeping its own edges. A lassi is blended, creamy, and yogurt-based, with the tartness folded into the texture rather than sitting on top of it.

Coconut is the ingredient that explains how one beer gets to both. It carries a soft, fatty sweetness that rounds off sharper fruit, and in a sour base that roundness reads as body. Papaya is the more unusual of the two fruits here, milder and muskier than the mango and passionfruit that dominate the category.

That leaves the tea doing the structural work. Green tea contributes tannin and a faint vegetal bitterness, and in a beer already carrying acidity and fruit sugar, that provides a dry edge for everything else to land against. It is the least showy of the three additions and probably the one that keeps the beer from tipping into syrup.

Star Chamber is available now through Hudson Valley Brewery in Beacon, alongside Ultrasphere and the latest entry in the brewery's rotating single hop series.