Jan. 18, 2012 - Issue #848: City of champions
To the Pint
Hippity-hoppity
Hop heads rejoice—the Hop Box arrives in Alberta
Hop BoxPhillips Brewing, Victoria, BC
$24.99 for 12 pack
As regular readers will know, in this space I normally select one beer to review. I tell a bit of the brewery's story, offer some background on the beer and offer my evaluation of the beer. Pretty good formula, on the whole.
However, this week there was just no way I could restrict myself to one beer. You see, I wanted to review something from Victoria's Phillips Brewing, which recently entered the Alberta market. I like the brewery's story and I like its beer. But when deciding what to pick, I stumbled across its sampler 12-pack. Most craft brewers offer a sampler pack as a low-risk way to introduce its beer to new consumers, usually offering a range of product to please all palates.
This sampler was unusual. They call it the Hop Box, and it contains three bottles each of four different India Pale Ales. Yes, four versions of IPA—one of the hoppiest beer styles. I can say with a fair degree of confidence that it is the only brewery in the world that offers a sampler pack consisting only of IPAs. The thing is, it is not the only thing Phillips brews, and it could have offered other styles. But I must admit this fits the brewery's personality to a tee.
Phillips Brewing loves its hops. It specializes in bitter, hoppy beer. As mentioned it also has brown ale, porter, pale lager and others in its arsenal. But the bitter beer are its first love.
Phillips is an unusual brewery in more ways than one. Founded 10 years ago, Matt Phillips financed the start-up Spike Lee-style with a half-dozen credit cards and a personal line of credit, as no bank would give him a loan. As the only employee for the first 18 months, he hand delivered beer around town in his Subaru station wagon, and even lived at the brewery to minimize expenses. The first brewhouse was cobbled together with spare parts and built from scratch by Phillips: a classic example of DIY brewing. Today, Phillips employs more than 20 people and distributes beer across BC, and now Alberta—and those credit cards are long since paid off.
But enough of the backstory. What about the four IPAs in the box? The first I sampled is the brewery's anchor beer, Hop Circle IPA. A medium gold beer, it holds a substantial head and releases a grassy, fruity hop aroma balanced with some biscuit backbone. The sip provides a soft, toffee malt upfront and some grassy hops in the middle. The linger is a classic American hop quality, with citrus, grass and a light fruit character of peach, pineapple and pear. A nicely balanced American-style IPA.
The Skookum Cascadian Brown Ale, one of the first Canadian attempts at a new style invented in the northwest US, Dark IPA—sometimes called Cascadian IPA—is a hybrid between a brown ale and an IPA. The Skookum pours mahogany brown with a light tan head, offering chocolate and nut aroma blended with a grassy hop accent. The flavour is similarly blended. It starts with milk chocolate and roasted almond sweetness but the beer sharpens quickly with the onset of a grassy, woody hop flavour. The finish is both nutty and bitter. This isn't the best version I have tasted of this new style, but it does offer an intriguing balance of flavours.
The third is also an intriguing experiment. It is an IPA made from a single type of hop to spotlight the character of that hop. They call it Grow Hop and use only the American classic hop Cascade in it. The aroma gives away right away which hop it is; sharp and grassy with a distinct grapefruit note. The flavour also channels Cascade, balanced by a light biscuit malt base. A lovely beer that proves that a great IPA need not be complicated. Cascade can hold up the entire hop bill on its own. I hope Philips does more in this series.
My favourite of the four might just be the Krypton Rye Pale Ale, which despite the name is an IPA and as the name suggests uses malted rye. A light gold beer with a rocky white head, the aroma is sharp and citrusy with big hops and a touch of angular malt. The first part of the sip delivers a spicy, almost peppery, malt sweetness accented by some light fruit. This is the rye talking—it adds a sharp spiciness to a beer. The hops are equal to the task, providing a satisfying grapefruit and pine bitterness. The linger has a lovely blend of citrusy hop and peppery malt. This beer works for me because through the rye it offers a new dimension to IPA that accents the hop really well.
I think I mentioned that Philips brews other beer as well, including some good Belgian-style ales. But hops is what the brewery is about, and if you are too, you need to pick up this one-of-a-kind sampler pack. V
Jason Foster is the creator of onbeer.org, a website devoted to news and views on beer from the prairies and beyond.
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