Medusa is a yearly release from Helios. For the first few years, I found her to be a fairly straightforward black IPA: citrus, pine, coffee, roast, bitterness.
In 2022, she became more wily: ripe orchard fruits, deceptively easy to drink, but with plenty of bite. “Smooth of skin but strong of jaw.”*
In 2023, she was roastiness and charry bitterness at first… then citrus sherbet bombs paired with cold espresso… then fresh pineapple and herbs atop wok-charred rice. And somehow, among all of this: crisp.
Now that 2024 has arrived, Medusa may as well stop calling herself a Gorgon and start identifying as a siren. She’s alluring but dangerous. Her head’s the colour of bone, her body, the reddish brown of drying blood. You’d think that’d be enough to warn you off. But her song is her aroma, which carries through the air with fruits and dankness aplenty. Alongside a hefty dosing of hops in the whirlpool and dry-hop stages, Helios head brewer Jake Harrison threw in some Rakau Subzero Hop Kief – AKA liquid hops, concentrated lupulin, all the aroma with none of the leafy bits – as well as a mix of terpenes (aromatic compounds) from cannabis, fruit, and hops.
Before you get too excited by the mention of cannabis, Jake is sure to stress in this video about Medusa: “Nothing suss! It’s all above board.”
As impactful as the hops are, it’s the malts that really grabbed my attention here; they’re playing a more seductive game than I usually find in a black IPA. Rather than roasty bitterness, I’m getting creamy sweetness on the nose: a scoop of coffee ice cream, a scoop of chocolate ice cream, and a scoop of really high quality vanilla ice cream. The kind that contains an extra couple of qualifying words in its name, like Madagascan Vanilla Bean Double-Whipped Ice Cream. They draw you in, and make everything a bit too easy to drink as this 440ml can of 7.6 percenter slithers its way into your inner being.
Like I said: a siren. Tie yourself to the mast and enjoy the music.
Mick Wüst
*Why the archaic sentence structure? Because the beer write-up took the form of a poem evocative of an ancient Greek epic. Obviously.
Published July 22, 2024 2024-07-22 00:00:00
