I was minding my own business, lugging boxes of beer around in Leaside, when I feel a tap on my shoulder and I turn around. I’m staring at a sternum, just about nipple high. Now, Jack Burton would tell you that the back of your favourite head was about to get friendly with the wall. Joe Wiebe, a mountain of a man with the hair of surfer era Brad Pitt, is standing there, and he tells me to close my eyes and hold out my hands. Now, I’d met him the previous day, but there were witnesses in the room so I took my chances. When I open them there’s a can of Driftwood’s Sartori Harvest IPA in them. 

Now, Joe is my opposite number on The Growler out in BC, so I should have known everything was going to be alright. He’s got a lot on his plate including two editions of Craft Beer Revolution (now in its second edition), managing content for the BC Ale Trail, Victoria Beer Week, and presumably rescuing frisbees from trees for neighbourhood children. 

He’s tall and kind is what I’m saying. And he’s got great taste in beer as it turns out. 

As a fan of wet hop or fresh hopped beers, I’ve been sitting here contemplating just how many height jokes I can make before the nose on this beer distracts me. I’m looking at the Driftwood website and it’s meant to be Centennial, but this is red berry instead of pine. In fact, it’s leaning gummy Swedish berry from a foot and a half out as I type. 

Apparently the hops come from Sartori Cedar Ranch in Chilliwack BC and are whisked away to the brewers at Driftwood at the peak of harvest. The fascinating thing to me is that there aren’t tasting notes on the website. How could you know what they’d be until the beer was finished? I have rubbed hops fresh and dried and pelletized and they don’t completely translate. You can’t guess at this and be accurate in the way you need to be for the audience that wants this. 

There’s not much in the way of moving parts here. Website says Crystal and Pilsner malts, and if that’s Crystal, it’s not much of it. The colour is gently modified by it and that red fruit isn’t conflated Crystal dried fruit. The nose has that low pine shrub berry which animals can eat and you shouldn’t. It’s all Christmas pine bough and sandalwood incense with that touch of phenol on the palate that speaks to whole cone tannin, petals protecting resin. The sharpest thorn defending the rose. It’s drying on the tongue but electric, like licking the terminals of a nine volt battery; pleasantly astringent with a prompted salivary response that doesn’t quite turn the clock back to neutral on the first sip.

But you go back for more because the aroma is inviting and the malt presence on the palate prior to the finish lingers tantalizingly a centimeter above your tongue, refusing really to engage with the sheer assault of the fresh hop character. All that hop and it’s still clear in the glass.

Having brewed a fresh hop beer recently, I have to say I prefer a subtler approach, but trying this is a treat. It’s the other end of the spectrum, and I can see why there’s a lineup for it annually. There’s nothing else like it.

Did You Buy This Beer?: Nah. Fraternal editorial privilege.

Knowing What You Know Now, Would You Buy This Beer?: I want to go to the event when it’s released. I need to know who the audience for this is. Can they drink six of them? Would their tongues dry completely out?

Did You Finish It?:   Oh, hell yeah.