We’ve never heard of Hopjutter and know nothing about them. We’re going to look them up after we’ve written this review of their Triple Hop (7.3‰).
The bottle suggests amateurism and we braced ourselves for the bottle to explode on opening. It did not: it hissed and emitted a leafy aroma that made us think of dandelions and daisies.
It is carbonated like a saison, and 330ml easily filled a pint glass with a steady Mr Whippy-like foam.
The first sips were dominated by a punishing bitterness and a numbing quality, like Szechuan peppercorns. Getting through that, an underlying hedgerow-weed and cats’ pee character became apparent. It seemed thin and sweaty, with some clove and aniseed (fennel?).
We were ready to write it off as nasty at this point, more useful as a paint to stop children sucking their thumbs than as a drink, but something made us persevere — perhaps that moreish bitterness — and, eventually, we began to warm to it.
There was certainly evidence of generous hopping, and a strident lemon peel note riding high over everything else ultimately made it quite bearable.
Is it rough and amateurish; or is it complex, challenging and an acquired taste? It’s so hard to tell the difference sometimes.
We wouldn’t buy it again, but we certainly don’t regret having paid €2.80 for this one bottle and giving our palates a work out.
Now we’ve looked them up: it seems they are award-winning home brewers; this is supposed to be an IPA; and Ratebeer users are surprisingly keen.
3 replies on “Hopjutter Triple Hop”
They were “Hopjutters” last year when I tried this. The beer was similarly all over the place, though.
This is why people go on about consistency. If Hopjutter[s] can reproduce the same extreme & borderline undrinkable flavour profile over and over again, they’re doing it deliberately & it’s potentially interesting (at least, it’s interesting to people who like that sort of thing, possibly because they’ve researched the mainstream of British real ale so thoroughly that they’re getting a bit jaded with it). If the next two bottles you tried were extreme & borderline undrinkable in different ways, you’d know the brewers were chancers – or, at best, not ready for prime time. The problem with this argument is that the only way anyone is going to find out is by drinking several bottles of an extreme & borderline undrinkable 7.2% IPA – so we’ll probably never know.
One of the best things about decent wine is the bottle variation and change over time. I never think about brewers’ “intentions” and if a beer makes me think one day but not the next I assume that is like most things in life.