Founders - Azacca IPA

Not to interject, but I've always thought of Mosaic as having that "dank" flavor. I've only had a couple of other Azacca hopped beers, a pale ale from Free State Brewery and Petit Azacca from de Garde. I don't recall getting any dankness from either--more tropical and tangerine.

 

Is this going to be year round?

 

You had me in agreement with you until you listed off the other beers you'd prefer over it...

 

Cant wait! Anything with mango, they heard the demand.

 

So, it's strange. After having Terrapin Mosaic on two different occasions and Evil Twin's Single Hop Mosaic Imperial India Pale Wheat Lager, I agree with a previous post you made that said there's a lot of berry coming off Mosaic and not a whole lot of dankness. However, one of my absolute favorite pale ales, Ballast Point Grunion, has that same dank, oniony aroma and flavor similar to Hop Ranch. Grunion only uses Mosaic and Calypso, to my knowledge, and so I deduced that it must be the Calypso which is bringing that dankness to the table, not the Mosaic. So, recently Evil Twin released their Single Hop Calypso Imperial India Wheat Lager and I was excited to see if my deduction was correct...it wasn't. The beer gave off almost no dankness but rather an earthy, dry, herbal hop quality. So now I'm confused. Is it that, only when blended with other hop varietals, Mosaic gives off the dankness since it too is in Hop Ranch? Because, honestly, I very rarely like single hop beers. The only single hop beer that I really love, to my knowledge, is Zombie Dust. Most other single hop beers are just too one-note for me to really enjoy, not surprisingly.

And, to answer your Azacca question, the only beer I remember drinking that I knew had Azacca hops in it was that Hi-Wire one which did give off some dankness but there was also El Dorado giving off some spicy, earthy tones as well. I could've swore one of the Sierra Nevada Harvest ales had Azacca and I enjoyed it but, after searching, I can only find that their beer camp collab with CCB, the Tropical Maibock, had Azacca which I did not enjoy. I guess it's back to the drawing board for me as to trying to figure out where this awesome dankness comes from.

 

Thank you for taking the time to construct this thoughtful post.

I suppose it is possible that Mosaic when combined with another hop can 'create' different flavors? I have used Mosaic both as single hops in a homebrewed Mosaic IPA and I have used it in another IPA where I combined it with Centennial and Simcoe. Neither of those two beers exhibited any dankness for my palate. For the Mosaic/Centennial/Simcoe IPA I used equal amounts of those three hops for all additions (flavor. end of boil and dry hopping); I was surprised how Mosaic dominated the aroma/flavor profile with berry fruit favors being the most prominent flavor.

I hope that Founders Azacca IPA is distributed to my area so I can try that beer.

Cheers!

 

A hop variety can have different character depending on when it is harvested, the farm, and even down to the field.

Jack has a good point, Stan Hieronymus has talked of synergy when certain hops are used together.

 

I appreciate you trying to get to the bottom of this.

 

The critical word is "trying".

Cheers!

 

A sad truth. Nearly impossible for me to grab one of their IPAs over their darker styles especially with breakfast available

 

Is it not possible that the flavor profile changes over time? In the case of Grunion in particular, I found that fresh cans were especially fruity with a lot of berry, but that they gradually acquired more dank/oniony flavors over time. These were beers from the same batch that I drank over the course of a few weeks. Just an anecdote of course, but I've noticed some pretty drastic changes in flavor over the course of weeks with a lot of other hop-forward beers.

 

Mosaic is my favorite hops and I have to agree that I don't get any oniony-Dankness from it when it's used by itself.

 

Cans?! If Grunion cans show up in my market, I'm buying a case.

 

yep, they're out there! although, thinking back, the stuff i had was probably in bottles before they were canning it.

 

I'll bite. Hope this makes it to VA. Good looking label as well.

 

Despite the name, nowhere does it say that it's single hopped with Azacca. That may be the case, but it's not guaranteed. Founders Centennial is not single hopped. Magnum is used for bittering.

 

Had this at the taproom/restaurant during KBS week. It was fine IMO, but not fantastic.

 

Excited for this one!

 

This should have been called AZACCA-ly.

Ba-da-ching....

 

Wasn't there a Sierra Nevada harvest ale that exclusively used Azacca last year? The one that had a prominent blueberry element to it?