Lupulin!

My first taste of true, fresh-hopped ale was three years ago. I'd arrived back into Portland after finishing a business trip and, with the rest of the day off, hit the Full Sail tasting room. The Lupulin Ale (humulus lupulus is, of course, the scientific classification for hops) that I had that day was eye-opening. I'd never tasted anything quite like it - the hop flavor was exploding out of the glass.

Since then, I've made it a point to get back there during the first few weeks of September when the new batches are released. Really enjoyed tasting the different variants with the varieties of hops involved. While I would not be able to tell you in a blind-test which one is which, I can definitely taste the difference in Centennial versus, say, Cascade.

This year, as far as I have been able to tell and as I indicated in my last post, the newest batch was made with First Gold and it's got a much more pronounced bitterness to the front end than some of the other varieties I can recall. The next few seconds are all hops and citrus flavor and it finishes clean. But yes, more of your bitter citrus (white grapefruit comes to mind) instead of your sweeter types - I will be very interested to try the Centennial in a week or two and make a comparison.

Events of the weekend blocked other trips to other locales, but I should be hitting them in the next week. Also: tonight I'll be getting into Bitches Brew and seeing if the fuss is worth the . . . um, fuss. Write-up on that tomorrow.