Deeds Brewing collaborational NEIPA with Hop Products Australia (HPA) to celebrate
the Australian release of the new hop variety Eclipse 'And Everything Under The Sun Is In Tune' is a part of HPA's mixed pack released to showcase the new Eclipse hop. Eclipse was developed by HPA back in 2004 and has been used under the less imaginative name HPA-016 so might not be super new to your palate.
New hop varieties are produced by cross breeding different parent varieties, and selecting for features, flavours, traits that you might want to combine.
Because hop plants are either male or female (dioecious), rather than having male and female parts on one flower (hermaphroditic), or male and female separately on the same plant (monoecious), hop breeders can have control over what gets bred with what to select the favourable features from each parent. Hop breeders collect the pollen (male sex cells)
from one plant and cross it to the female flowers of another plant. Eclipse has the same mother as another fruit forward hop Galaxy, called J78, which is the progeny of HPAs famous Pride of Ringwood. Basically making Galaxy and Eclipse half siblings.
The most noticeable difference with Eclipse vs it's "step-sibling" Galaxy is that it has none of the dankness of Galaxy making it more versatile for using in a variety of beer styles from Saisons to Dark Ales.
This NEIPA pours a perfect pale haze with a super silky mouthfeel. Tastes of very ripe sweet mandarin without the astringency and has a subtle bitterness, despite the strong citrus aroma. The creaminess from the oats mellows the fruit nicely to make this beer super easy drinking.
HPA probably made the right call delaying the release of Eclipse until now, with craft beer drinkers thirsty for new flavour combinations and breweries wanting to push flavour boundaries, Eclipse is a welcome addition to the hop market.
Cheers to plant breeding and science in beer!