Beer Bridge Road Harvest / Dark Harvest 2013

The Bridge Road Harvest Ale is developing quite a tradition. Now in its fourth year, it sees the brewery's founder head to his local hop farm in the VIctorian High Country (at Rostrevor) and pluck an as-yet-unreleased experimental hop variety to be used in extravagant amounts in a one-off seasonal release. This year, however, there's been a slight change as there weren't enough hops of one variety to produce a beer to similar specs as before so two were used, two separate beers were brewed, then they were blended pre-release.

This year's Dark Harvest is also a different beast to its predecessor, which was brewed with Mikkeller during last year's harvest. Then the resultant Black IPA was all about the chocolate and orange characteristics; this time around they've selected a different hop variety with pronounced piney characteristics. Both are out on tap now, with the latter only appearing alongside the former.