Cellarmaker Brewing Company has released a West Coast IPA that functions as a thank-you note, and it names the beers it is thanking.

Absolutely Fantastic is a 7 percent West Coast IPA brewed with Kern River Brewing Company, out now through Cellarmaker's presale, with cans shipping Tuesday. It is hopped with Citra, Amarillo, Simcoe and what the brewery calls a hit of Cascade.

The framing is the story here. Cellarmaker credits Kern River with helping establish what a West Coast IPA could be in the late 2000s, and cites two specific beers. The first is Just Outstanding, which leaned on Simcoe and Amarillo at a point when neither was a household name. The second is Citra Double IPA, among the earliest beers built to showcase Citra when that hop was genuinely new. Cellarmaker's own words are that it would not be brewing the way it does without that influence.

That turns the hop bill into something more deliberate than it first appears. Citra, Amarillo and Simcoe are the varieties those older beers helped push into the mainstream, and Cascade is the hop that gave American IPA its original accent. Assembled in 2026 they look conventional. Assembled as a reference to a specific moment, they read as a list of what was once unusual. Cellarmaker describes the blend as bringing classic and new-school characters together, and says the beer is loud and juicy.

Kern River, based in Kernville in the southern Sierra Nevada, has been a recurring name in California hop-forward brewing for two decades. The brewery marked its twentieth anniversary this year with a collaboration series of its own, one entry of which was also brewed with Cellarmaker. This release runs in the other direction: Cellarmaker's beer, on Cellarmaker's label, pointed back at Kern River.

Absolutely Fantastic is available through the presale, which ends Tuesday morning.

Editor’s Take

Citra, Amarillo, Simcoe and Cascade. Read that list cold in 2026 and it sounds like the hop aisle at its least adventurous, the brewing equivalent of ordering the house red. Read it as a tribute to the late 2000s, which is how Cellarmaker is explicitly framing it, and every one of those names is a small historical marker. That is the trick this beer is pulling, and it is a good one: the hop bill only looks safe because the beers being honored here did their job so thoroughly that the exotic became the default.

I am also charmed that the thank-you note takes the form of a seven percent West Coast IPA rather than, say, a plaque. Brewers have a limited vocabulary for expressing admiration and it mostly involves making someone a beer, which beats most industries' approach to the same problem. The name is doing honest work too. Absolutely Fantastic sits in the same register as Just Outstanding, the Kern River beer it is nodding at, right down to the slightly understated adverb-adjective construction. A high five, Cellarmaker calls it. Delivered in the correct dialect.

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.

Absolutely Fantastic Rebuilds the Hop Bill That Taught It Everything

A collaboration that doubles as a credit roll. Cellarmaker points at the late-2000s Kern River beers that shaped how it brews, then builds the tribute out of the same hops those beers made famous.

Source & Editorial