Citra American Pale Ale

Citra hops are a very new variety: only commercially available since 2008. Since becoming widely available, these American hops have become almost “trendy”, if you can have such a thing in the beer world. There are a large number of craft breweries, in the UK, US and elsewhere, that delight in their citrus fruit flavour and aroma. They have been described as: peach, apricot, passion fruit, grapefruit, lime, melon, gooseberry, lychee fruit, pineapple, mango, papaya and other tropical fruit flavours and aromas.

I’ve had some lovely beers made with citra, and I wanted to give them a try. One problem: Andy’s had plenty of beers made with citra too, and he really doesn’t like them. It became a bit of a running joke, and so more as a wind-up than anything else I bought some a month or two back. (In fact the on line retailer actually sent me four packs by mistake, which made it look even more like a wind up!)

However, having bought them Andy relented and agreed that we’d make something with them. We decided to make an American Pale Ale – described as a “clean, fresh, hoppy beer with enough malt backbone to carry the moderate hop character and bitterness”.

I’ve seen some comments on the intertubes warning about using solely citra hops.(Suggestions of “cat’s pee” didn’t sound too appealing). So I decided we’d use 50% citra and 50% liberty – a softer, more Germanic style hop. Citra is also aggressively bitter (15% as opposed to Liberty’s 5%).

We made it last Monday and it has been fermenting frantically since then – nearly done now and ready for racking.

The question now is what on earth to do with the remaining three and a half packs of citra! Actually I gave a pack to my brewing friend Andy Bowers – he was talking about making a brown ale hopped with citra. Sounds bizarre, but hey, you have to try these things!