I’d never heard the phrase "new sky" before, so I googled it. The first page of results gave me a number of video clips for songs, a solar energy company, and a new-and-improved kind of durable yarn. I’m going to go ahead and guess that Bridge Road aren’t referencing New Sky yarn – although it is described as "surprisingly light", "soft" and "delicious".
No, for Bridge Road’s New Sky series, it’s more of a new horizons, dawn-of-a-new-day type thinking. The BRB crew are exploring modern variations on where IPAs are now and where they’re going. Vol. 1 in the series was a West Coast that straddled old school and new school, while Vol. 2 – their Triple Dry-Hopped Super-Saturated Cold IPA using Spectrum – was about as new school as it gets.
Bridge Road describe Vol. 3, their Triple Dry-Hop Hazy with Citra, Galaxy and Nelson Sauvin hops, as being “hopped 3 times, using 3 hop varieties, from 3 continents.”* This almost had me suggesting that New Zealand isn’t from a separate continent to Australia when I remembered a fascinating article I read about how New Zealand was recently discovered to be the peak of its own underwater continent called Zealandia. Cool, right?
On the surface level, this beer doesn’t blow you away – and it’s not trying to. Stonefruit and citrus come together in a beautiful thick body with a slight alcohol flavour (but no heat). Very tasty, but not new in the way that Vol. 2 was.
But as with Zealandia, sometimes there’s more going on beneath the surface. I realised at some point that this beer brings together the most popular and widely used variety of hop from the US, the most popular and widely used variety of hop from Australia, and the most popular and widely used variety of hop from New Zealand. And it does this with zero astringency and wonderful integration of flavours. This is not something we were seeing in Aussie hazies even a few years ago.
This is the kind of beer you’d happily send into space so aliens could get a representation of a good hazy IPA.
Mick Wüst
*It so happens I’m also the third Crafty Pint team member to write up a beer in this series.
Published December 5, 2022 2022-12-05 00:00:00
