At this year’s BeerX conference in Sheffield, Fyne Ales MD Jamie and I couldn’t help but note the number of award-winners starring the American hop, Citra. After the fourth or fifth Citra-centric winner was announced (including our flagship session ale, Jarl), I jokingly said to Jamie “Everyone bloody loves Citra” and the idea for a new summer session series was born.

For this summer’s session cask special series, we’re taking it back to basics and running a series of new single-hop spins on the recipe for our lovely Jarl. A few little tweaks here and there – oats in place of wheat, a bigger dry-hop charge here and there if we think it needs the extra aroma tasting from tank, but at their core, every beer in the series will be based on Jarl, but each showcasing a different single hop.

We’re kicking off this week with Everyone Loves Mosaic, showcasing arguably the most popular hop in craft beer today. We’ve gone big with whole cones on the hot side and given it a kick of T90 on the dry-hop – for 3.8% it packs a punch of fruit flavours – soft stone fruit aromas with beautifully balanced and rounded citrus, berry and tropical notes on the palette.

We’ll be following up with two more in the core part of the series – Everyone Loves Pekko, a fairly new hop variety which blew us away at the hop-rub event at our suppliers earlier in the year and finishing up with Everyone Loves Nelson, which I’m personally most excited about because I bloody love Nelson Sauvin.

There’s also going to be two small-batch variants in the series – Trial 215 and Trial 212. Both beers are single-hop session pales, again using the same malt base as Jarl (for the most part) and coming in at 3.8%, but both feature two brand new experimental hops.

CF215 will hit first – it’s a new British hop engineered by Charles Faram which is exclusive to Fyne Ales this year – we bought the whole crop of whole cones. It offered really intriguing aromas with hints of both coriander and strawberries on the rub, but expressed itself with a much earthier, almost German noble-hop character in the beer we brewed with it. Trial 215, coming next week, is ultra-pale, ultra-clean and ultra-thirst-quenching – it could be the star of the whole series.

We’ll be back with more news about Trial 212 and updates on the rest of the series soon.

Cheers!