The hops in this beer were on the bine at breakfast and in the kettle by mid-afternoon. That compressed schedule is the entire point of Cellarmaker Brewing Company's Green Knuckle series, and this year's entry puts the most familiar hop in American brewing through it.

Green Knuckle: Citra is a wet hop West Coast IPA at 6.4 percent, out now as part of a presale from the Berkeley brewery, with beers shipping Tuesday. The series is an annual single-variety run, and the rule Cellarmaker sets for it is that each batch comes from one farm and shows that farm's version of one cultivar. This year's cones came from Coleman Agriculture in Independence, Oregon.

That address carries some weight. Coleman is the largest hop farm in the state, and its Independence ground is part of the historic Wigrich Ranch, which in the 1920s was the biggest hop yard in the world under a single trellis. Independence spent the early twentieth century calling itself the Hop Capital of the World. For a series built on the idea that an individual farm has an expression worth isolating, it is a reasonable place to start.

Why undried hops read differently

Cellarmaker's argument for the beer is technical, and it holds up. Hops are normally kilned after picking so they can be stored and pelletized, and that drying step carries off some of the most volatile aromatic compounds, including the thiols and terpenes the brewery name-checks. Wet hopping skips the kiln entirely. What you get is a narrow autumn window and a hop that smells like the field rather than the bale.

Applied to Citra, the brewery says the result is a long way from the Citra most drinkers have filed away. Its notes run to key lime, tangerine and passionfruit over what it calls a canvas of overripe Alphonso mango. Underneath the fruit, Cellarmaker describes the green register wet hops tend to bring: fresh-cut sweetgrass and a touch of something resinous.

The brewery is blunt about the shelf life. Those compounds degrade quickly, and it recommends drinking the beer fast rather than holding it. That is standard for the format, but it is worth repeating for anyone inclined to save a can for later.

Green Knuckle: Citra is available through Cellarmaker's online presale, which closes Tuesday morning.

Editor’s Take

Everyone knows what Citra tastes like. That is rather the problem with Citra. It is the hop that turned up in 2008 and then turned up in everything afterward, until describing a beer as a Citra beer stopped narrowing anything down at all. So there is something quietly cheeky about building a whole single-variety showcase around the one hop nobody thinks needs showcasing, and then pointing out that the version we all know is the version that went through a kiln first.

The tasting note I cannot get past is overripe Alphonso mango. Not mango. Alphonso, which is a specific Indian cultivar with a specific season, and overripe at that, which is a further specification on top of the first one. Somebody at Cellarmaker tasted this beer and went looking for exactly the right mango. That is the sort of precision that usually gets flattened into tropical in a tasting note, and I am glad it survived the edit.

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.

Green Knuckle: Citra Catches the Compounds Kilning Burns Off

Citra picked in the morning and in the brewhouse by that afternoon, from one named farm in Oregon. Cellarmaker says undried cones carry aromatics the kiln usually takes, and the notes run to key lime and Alphonso mango.

Why undried hops read differently

Source & Editorial