Pig Wants to Fight Puts Thiolized Yeast Behind Classic IPA Hops

The interesting part of this collaboration is a word most drinkers will not recognize: thiolization. Great Lakes Brewery and Bellwoods Brewery have used it on their new IPA, and it explains a good deal of what the brewery says the beer smells like.

Pig Wants to Fight is a 6.5 percent IPA, brewed jointly by the two Toronto breweries and released during GLB Beer Week. Great Lakes describes a heavyweight blend of classic IPA hops producing passionfruit, bright citrus and ripe mango, building to what it calls a firm, pine-dank crescendo before a resinous dry finish.

Thiols are the reason those first three notes get top billing. Hops carry a set of intensely aromatic sulfur compounds, but much of that material arrives bound to other molecules in a form that the nose cannot detect. Thiolized brewing uses yeast strains or enzymes capable of cleaving those bonds during fermentation, freeing aroma that would otherwise stay locked up and go down the drain with the trub. The compounds released this way skew heavily toward passionfruit, guava and grapefruit, which is why a brewery reaching for the technique tends to end up describing a beer in exactly those terms.

It is a pointed choice on a beer the brewery otherwise frames as classic. Rather than chase the tropical end of the spectrum with newer hop varieties, Great Lakes and Bellwoods appear to have gone at it from the yeast side and let familiar hops do more than they normally would. The pine and resin arriving late suggest the traditional character was never meant to disappear, just to share the room.

Bellwoods is a well-established name in Toronto brewing, and the two breweries marked the release with a joint event at Thirsty and Miserable on the evening the newsletter went out.

Pig Wants to Fight arrives Thursday, October 1, at the Etobicoke brewery, the GLB Brewpub on Lower Jarvis Street, and the online shop. Cans are 473ml at $3.75, or $80 for a case.