Time for another brewery-retailer collab out of WA, this one pairing the brewers at Otherside with the team behind the Copper & Oak bottleshops. Golden Hour isn't just a meeting of minds between those partners, either. It's also a meeting of hops old(ish) and new, and something of a melding of styles: they're calling it a "West Coast XPA".
On the West Coast hopping front, they plumped for "modern classic American" varieties Simcoe, Citra and CTZ (a trio of similar hops Columbus, Tomahawk, and Zeus) up front, before going futuristic with a charge of Nelson SubZero hop kief, a new product from Freestyle Hops – who we wrote about here – that's essentially a concentrated liquid into which they've crammed as much flavour and aroma as they can. On the XPA front, it's a case of keeping the malt bill stripped back and the fermentation clean so as not to get in the way of the hops.
And they've hit the target, creating a beer that's lean, clean and highly drinkable without losing the fruitiness from the hops. It pours a clear golden, with melon, mandarin and grapefruit rind leading the charge and a dank, resinous underbelly keeping things grounded. Yum.
James Smith
Published September 21, 2023 2023-09-21 00:00:00
