“Our southern hemisphere juice series slowly keeps growing with its latest addition of Waimea Juice. Quite possibly one of our favorite hops of the decade, we’ve found that it plays amazingly well with heavy hitters like Citra and Mosaic; but we’ve also found it makes a remarkable single-hop all on its own. This hop is fully capable of the juice but with some seriously impressive west coast-centric tendencies, piling on with complex notes of freshly squeezed tangerine juice, kumquats, white grapefruit, pomelo wedges, mango puree, pineapple flesh, and a hefty dose of pine needle oil.” 

Glassware: IPA.

Appearance: Pours a gorgeous light pastel orange with a thick and creamy two finger head. Good retention and lacing on the glass.

Aroma: Not what we were expecting. At first the typical NZ hop accents were missing and it was throwing out a lot of thick stone fruit sweetness i.e apricot, rockmelon, papaya. But slowly the ultra green, oily, piney and resinous characters start to bleed through. That’s kinda where it ends though. Nice bready malt bill to it – crusty, doughy, semi sweet. It’s a fine aroma, it just doesn’t strike us as much of an NZ IPA.

Flavour: Once again we both have dumbfounded looks on our faces. The initial flavour is weird. The closest thing we can come to flavour-wise is an orange zooper dooper with a twist of funky, unripened passionfruit. Throw in some candied lemon and pine needle and that about sums it up. Actually, add a fair whack of herbal citrus to that – lemongrass, lemon thyme and rosemary. Nice smooth finish with good length.

Mouthfeel: Creamy, velvety, well aerated. Medium body and finely carbed. The 6.6% ABV is well behaved.

Overall: Don’t know where we sit with this. We weren’t all that familiar with Waimea hops so maybe this was a good crash course into the characteristics of this hop. Not bad.