San Diego, CA — We’ll be filling our very first bottles this week! The beer: Oneida, our lavishly dry-hopped 5.8% pale ale. The package: 22oz bottles. Availability: at both the Lomaland Fermentorium & the North Park Flavordome on Thursday, and at select bottle shops around SoCal starting Friday. This is a one-time deal (for now), so once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Oneida is all about the hops, which in this case are Hallertau Blanc, Cascade, and Experimental Hop 05256. Hallertau Blanc is a new German variety that is very fruity/white wine grapey; it’s the German growers’ attempt at a Nelson-like hop. They largely succeeded, but it doesn’t have the dank bass note that Nelson does, which is why we added the Experimental Hop 05256 (it’s like a fruitier Simcoe). The grapefruit character of Cascade blends with the light fruitiness of the Hallertau Blanc and adds a slightly resinous charge, turning the whole thing into a delicious fruit/hop orgy.
We gave Oneida a very simple, stripped-down malt bill to keep the focus on the hops, while providing just enough backbone to let us really pile on the radness.
For those of you who have had the chance to taste Oneida in our tasting rooms, prepare your piehole because the batch going into bottles is easily the best version of Oneida yet (and the first batch with 05256).
Why bottles? Because new cans are an enormous logistical undertaking. We’ll be filling 450 cases total of Oneida. For a canning run to make sense, we’d need to fill around 3,000 cases. And we don’t have anywhere near that kind of capacity (nor the supply of these rare hops). Oneida may make it into cans some day, but that day is a ways off.