Name: Fighting Weight
Brand: Great Lakes Brewery
Availability: InStock

The premise involves an octopus on a weight cut. Great Lakes Brewery has brought back Fighting Weight, its fall and winter session IPA, and the explanation for the beer's modest strength is entirely a matter of brewery mythology.

Octo, the brewery's cartoon mascot, is described as the reigning Ontario Super Heavyweight champion who has run out of challengers in his division. The brewery's account has him now seeking the featherweight title, with one complication: he does not qualify, being, in the newsletter's words, too dang jacked. Hence the beer, and hence its 3.6 percent ABV.

Great Lakes has not published a hop bill for this one. What the release does establish is the format: a pale, clear session IPA in the brewery's Tank Ten series, returning as a seasonal rather than arriving new. At 3.6 percent it sits well under most session IPAs, which more commonly land between 4 and 5, and that gap is where the demands of the style get real. Hop aroma has to carry a beer with very little malt body underneath it.

One practical change this time is reach. Alongside the brewery, the GLB Brewpub and the online shop, Fighting Weight is stocked at the LCBO, which puts it on shelves across Ontario rather than only in Etobicoke and Toronto.

Fighting Weight arrives Thursday, October 1, in 473ml cans at $3.35, or $65 for a case.

Editor’s Take

I want to acknowledge the commitment here. Great Lakes has a cartoon octopus named Octo who is, per the brewery's own description, a bit of a jerk and the reigning Ontario Super Heavyweight champion. Having run out of anyone willing to fight him, he is now attempting to drop into the featherweight division, and the obstacle is that he is too jacked to qualify. This is the explanation for a 3.6 percent beer. Not a flavour note, not a hop origin story. A weight cut.

The can shows him mid-workout in a sweatband with dumbbells in two tentacles and a stopwatch in a third, which is more arms than any boxer is entitled to and, frankly, raises questions about the fairness of his heavyweight reign that the brewery has chosen not to address. Beer naming so often reaches for the portentous and the mythic that a brewery cheerfully building a seasonal around a sporting technicality feels like a small act of public service.

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.

Fighting Weight Returns, With the Mascot Cutting to Featherweight

The fall and winter session IPA is back at 3.6 percent, with Great Lakes running a boxing bit about its octopus mascot dropping weight classes. It is also stocked at the LCBO this time.

Source & Editorial