Kodachrome Puts Three New-Wave Hops on a Munich Helles

Helles is the style built on restraint. Cabin has loaded one with Olicana, Dolcita and Krush - an English hop and two recent American releases - and named it after the film stock that made colour its whole argument.

Style: Hoppy Helles Lager
Release Date: 2026-09-29
ABV: 5.4%
Cabin Brewing Company (Calgary, AB)

Helles is the style that made a virtue of staying out of the way. Cabin Brewing Company has just put three modern hops into one.

Kodachrome is a 5.4 percent hoppy Helles lager, new to the Calgary brewery's lineup and pouring now on tap, with cans and growlers to go. The hop bill is Olicana, Dolcita and Krush.

That combination is the reason to look. A traditional Munich Helles is pale, malt-led and deliberately quiet, a beer whose appeal is that you can drink it without thinking about it. None of the three hops here belong to that tradition.

Olicana is English, bred by Charles Faram in Worcestershire, and it brings mango, passion fruit and grapefruit rather than anything resembling a continental noble hop. Cabin has used it before, in last month's Afterglow. Dolcita and Krush are newer still. Both came out of the Hop Breeding Company, the John I. Haas and Yakima Chief Ranches joint venture responsible for Citra and Mosaic, and both spent years under developmental numbers before being named. Dolcita was HBC 1019, and is typically described in terms of peach and a creamy, almost coconut-like character. Krush was HBC 586 and only reached the commercial market in 2024, carrying orange, mango, guava, peach and berry.

So the beer runs one English variety and two recent American releases over a style that historically wants neither. The brewery's own framing leans into the contrast:

Some lagers are perfectly happy keeping a low profile. Kodachrome is not one of them.

Cabin describes layers of juicy stone fruit, fresh citrus and tropical character riding over a snappy malt backbone, and calls the result expressive without getting loud, hop-forward without forgetting it is a lager. Those are the brewery's notes rather than a verdict, but the structural claim behind them is sound enough. Lager fermentation strips out the fruity esters that a hazy IPA's yeast contributes, which leaves hop character with nowhere to blend in. Whatever these three varieties are doing, a clean Helles base will show it plainly.

The name is doing work too. Kodachrome was Kodak's colour slide film, known for saturation strong enough that it became shorthand for a certain kind of heightened, vivid image, and Cabin's copy plays on it throughout - full colour, turning up the colour, ready for its close-up.

Kodachrome joins a tap list that already carries Luminosity, a 5.2 percent German pils, which makes this Cabin's second current lager and the more experimental of the pair. It is available now at the brewery's 36 Avenue SE taproom.

Editor’s Take

Naming a beer Kodachrome is a bigger swing than it looks, because Kodachrome was not simply colour film. It was the film that oversaturated everything - skies bluer than the sky had been, reds that arrived before the rest of the photograph did. It is the stock people mean when they say old photos looked more alive than the day actually did. Attaching that to a Helles, the beer style whose entire reputation rests on not drawing attention to itself, is the joke and the thesis at the same time.

What keeps it from being only a joke is the hop bill, which is genuinely unusual company for a Munich lager. Olicana is English, bred in Worcestershire. Dolcita and Krush are both recent Hop Breeding Company varieties that spent years as numbers before anyone gave them names - HBC 1019 and HBC 586 - and both are still turning up mostly in hazy IPAs, which is where hops of that vintage normally go to be shouted at. Putting them over a clean lager base instead means nothing is hiding them. A Helles has no haze, no yeast character and no residual sweetness to blur an edge. Whatever these three actually taste like, this beer will tell you, and at 5.4 percent it will let you check twice.

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.