Eight Degrees is turning eight this year

First in the line up is a double dry-hopped IPA. This is a three-way collaboration between Eight Degrees, Bale Breaker Brewing – from the hop heaven that is Washington’s Yakima Valley – and Revolution Brewing, Chicago’s largest independent craft beer brewery. It’s a showcase of Yakima Valley’s finest hops chosen by Bale Breaker, a malt bill picked by Eight Degrees to feature the best of local Irish malt and a yeast strain chosen by Revolution. The result is a beer supercharged with hop freshness and aroma.

Malt: Two-Row Irish malted barley, CaraPils.

Hops: Simcoe + late addition of Citra and Jester.

ABV: 5.9%

IBUs: 65

Colour/appearance: deep, dark gold in the glass with a white, pillowy head.

Aroma: an up-front biscuit malt sweetness initially, followed by pepper spice and dank pine.

Flavour: medium carbonation, juicy and full bodied. A classic West Coast IPA, with sweet stone fruit to the forefront, quickly dominated by pine sap bitterness, alongside white pepper and ginger spice notes.

Aftertaste: a lemon marmalade bitterness that lingers.

We love beer and cheese and this IPA goes particularly well with blue cheese, especially our local favourite Cashel Blue, the creamy funk of the cheese contrasting beautifully with the bitterness of the beer. Make that Cashel Blue into a pungent blue cheese sauce for your rib eye and you hit two bases: that previously mentioned contrast alongside the complementary way that the Yellow Ball malt works with a properly sear on a steak. Or go sweet and put this beer with a traditional American sweet potato pie to play off the spices and cut through the richness.

Serving temperature: 8 degrees Celsius

Availability: 440ml cans, limited draught.

Get social: #YellowBallIPA