Next up are some tasting notes for a single-hopped beer brewed with Rakau. This is one of the fairly new hop varieties coming out of New Zealand. These were 11.4% AA pellets that I got from Rebel
Brewer. My aroma notes for the pellets read "grassy, tropical fruit,
spice".
The nose of the finished beer has an indistinct "sweet
fruit" aroma along the lines of papaya and sweet apples. There are also
some perfumy/floral notes.
The palate finds herbal flavors, along
with more generic "fruit" flavor. I also pick out some floral and spicy
notes along with some resin. Overall, the hop flavor seems kind of
muddled and indistinct, although I did get some nice cinnamon flavor as
the beer warmed up a bit. The Rakau's not bad, but not something I'd go
out of my way for again.
One other thing I noticed is that the Rakau beer had a pretty sharp bitterness. My bittering additions on these beers are a pseudo-FWH, so it's hard to
say for sure what kind of results this would give as a 60+ minute
addition in an IPA. I have this earmarked to try out in place of
Chinook/Columbus/Nugget as a bittering addition in the near future. I'll
be sure to report back once I try it out.
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