Hop City 2020 was meant to host the first UK pour of Vitamin Sea Brewing, so we’re super stoked that our second collaborative not-Hop City release is a collaboration with this Massachusetts-based brewery.

We’d already started discussing multiple recipes and those involved were unanimously in favour of seeing these through to fruition, even if they couldn’t attend themselves. This DDH IPA was put together with Dino of Vitamin Sea Brewing, Massachusetts. Even though we’d never met Dino in person, I was lucky enough to try his excellent IPAs whilst in the New England region last year, and they were top of the list of breweries that we wanted to work with. We selected perhaps the two most intense hop varieties available to us. One being Citra, with its tropical profile which needs little introduction, and the other, Strata. The new kid on the block coming out of Oregon, we fell in love with its intense passion fruit aromas from the very first smell. Combined, the results are an absolute powerhouse of an IPA, packed with ripe tropical fruits, lychee, lime zest and layers of pine to counter.