This year we are bringing back our domestically grown hoppy pilsner, using Shiga grown Chinook hops cultivated by the guys over at Flora Fermentation. These hops were harvested, dried, and then immediately used in our brew. Taking inspiration from a blend of German, American and Czech style pilsners, these locally grown Shiga hops normally carry a more noble-like character with floral, grassy and herbal notes akin to some classic German varieties, and so we decided to pair this domestic Chinook with imported Cascade and Centennial hops to boost the more pine and citrus character. We were pleasantly surprised, however, to find that the Shiga hops this year expressed themselves in a much more fruiter way than we expected, shoping that their hop bines have started to reach a good level of maturity, getting past the greener character of a younger plant.

As one might expect wth this style, the base beer has a classic malt profile consisting of Pilsner and Vienna malts, giving the beer a clean cracker-like flavour, allowing the hop profiles to shine through. The combination of hops gives a soft bitterness, along with a candied like grapefruit citrus flavour, resulting in a beer that is very light, floral, fruity, and drinkable. While we expected the domestic hops to need a lot of support from the pellets, we were very impressed with how prominently the Shiga hop character presented itself, and it is clearly the dominate hop flavour. As wiith any fresh hop beer, it is best to enjoy fresh, so we will be having our fair share of pints of this over the coming weeks!

* Eagle-eyed customers may notice a gap between the beer explanation on the can and that on this web page. The tricky point about fresh hops is that it is hard to tell which varieties will be ready and when. The honest truth is that we went to Shiga expecting to harvest Cascade hops, only to find after we got there that the Chinook were perfectly ripe and much better in character than the Cascade. We were too late to change the labels at that stage, but decided to go with the best hops for the beer, complementing the Chinook we picked up with Cascade pellets instead of the other way round. We are sorry for any confusion this caused, and hope that you feel the character of the final product proves that we made the right choice!