Beer – #236 – West Coast – 1080
I travelled to the Hopscotch Beer Company with my empty bottle today. I came away with a litre of West Coast 10-80, Brewed byWest Coast Brewing in the style of an India Pale Ale (IPA) and that’s on the West Coast, in Westport, New Zealand.
So named because this IPA has 80 different varieties of hops and 10 hop additions. A New Zealand first for that amount of hop varieties used in a beer!
80 appears to be the second highest number of hop varieties ever added to a beer, trailing just Top of the Hops 2012 from Great Yorkshire Brewery which had (allegedly) 2012, which wasn’t a raving success.
1080 is also a ‘popular’ poison in NZ so a fairly cheeky take on a name.
1 litre of a 6.5% ABV beer which in NZ makes that about 5.13 standard drink units.
The top fair flew off this , lucky it’s not a cork or damage would have been done. Fantastic Golden Orange pour, fluffy head of considerable beauty, huge amount of hop aroma, generic hop I have no idea which one in particular 🙂
For all the build up and trepidation this is very very mellow, almost to disappointment. I was expecting a much more rangy palate and something a bit harsher, what you get is almost soft and oversold. As beers go though this is very “Sessionable” it’s tasty combined with a relatively low ABV means that you should be ok with a few of these in you before you start to talking the nonsense.
As it warms up the profile really does not change, or expand, nothing is unusual or testing about this, it’s just competent and the pdubyah-o-meter says it should be a 7 good, which is disappointing because it should be a much better beer than that.
Now I’m thinking about it this must be an extremely limited output, I don’t know that you could replicate it the same, and probably that’s a good thing, as that amount of hops seems either irresponsible, or just someone taking a stock-take and being asked by the Finance guy to use what they have available.
Obviously there is no reason to add 80 hops. Clearly obviously because they’d all be doing it, right? I’ve had beers from brewery people who would revel in the way that could produce a 30 hopper, 40 hopper, 50 hopper… for example DogFishHead and the 30, 60, 75, and 90 minute IPA ones to mind.
But of course with Hops they’re all different and have different things about them. See here or here so it’s be a big ask to throw them all together to get a result of any merit and substance, wouldn’t it? Not only a big ask but a massive result if you could pull it off.
Sadly whilst amusing as ‘thing’ I’m not actually sure that they’ve managed to pull off anything other than a competent beer. But tonight it’s good enough.
Related articles
- Andrew Mailen Breaks Down The Secret Behind Beer’s Greatest Ingredient: Hops + What You Taste When You Drink Beer (bdp4life.com)
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