Update on Iridescence series

“Refreshing our most refreshing” Our Iridescence (or “Mansai” in Japanese) series started off as what we called our “fruited kettle sour” series. The inspiration behind it all started when we made our first ever sour beer in collaboration with the wonderful Jamil Zainasheff, legendary beer writer and founder of Heretic Brewing. The beer was Purple People Eater and it was a sour saison made with ume (sour plum) and red shiso.


While we have never been fans of very sweet beers, and used to hold a bit of prejudice towards fruited beers targeting people who “don’t really like beer”, sour beers shifted our entire perspective on the conversation of whether fruit had a place in beer. Whilst much more simple than the spectacular creations of Cantillon and other breweries making sours in barrels, kettle sours were something we very much appreciated for the fact they were typically dry, due to the fermentation of the sugars in the fruit, and immensely refreshing. Whilst “lemon sours” and such simple cocktails have long been treated as an ideal summertime drink in Japan, these seemed like an ideal beer equivalent, with a fair few more variables to boot.

Last year we made more kettle sours than we ever have before, and doing so really helped us to see what worked well and where we could work to make these even better.

More Punch in our Fruit
 Whilst we appreciate subtlety in a beer, fruit sours is perhaps a place where we want to really want the character of the fruit to shine through. We also felt that, while kettle souring is a great way to bring out the acidity, it was also susceptible to one or two characters that sometimes took away from what we were looking for from the fruit. Kettle souring is a way of making sour beer through the addition of lactobacillus – or lactic acid bacteria – to the wort before the boil to create a sourness that stays with the beer through fermentation. A couple of years back we started to occasionally use a yeast strain derived from bees that soured the beer in a similar way, and last year we took to another yeast strain called “Philly Sour” that we felt brought a cleaner and more pleasant sourness, whilst lending itself to allowing the sweeter aromas to shine.
 In short, our Mansai was no longer our “kettle sour” series, but now simply our “fruit sour” series.

We also decided that, while a couple of fruit varieties could hold up on their own, some types of fruit fermented out to a point where the character one associates with the fruit was no longer apparent. The beer was clean, pleasant and dry, but the aroma was milder than what we might have been looking for – especially when 1/3 of the beer volume started out as juice! With the reality that the sweetness doesn’t remain after fermentation, we have to think about what we will be left with. As a result, we felt that it was better in many cases to go for a blend of fruits, where various aromas and other elements meld well together to create something better than its individual parts.

So our decision was then made to reduce the number of fruit sours this year, chopping a couple that we felt weren’t doing the fruit or the beer justice, and revamping some of the recipes of the “keepers”.

A New Shape to Our Fruit
 Our first “updated” release is ○to△, our mixed citrus fruit sour, and a beer that aims to effectively represent the three elements of citrus (bitterness, acidity and sweetness) in a fully rounded way. The beer was ambitious when we first made it last year but we felt that some of the elements, including the lime leaves and the dry peel, didn’t come through the way we wanted it to.

This year, in addition to the huge amount of grapefruit and orange juice, we massively upped the amount of peel, with over 40kg used! (for reference, this is over double the previous max of 20kg we have ever used in a beer to date – and 20kg was a pretty crazy one!). The combination of peel used was the ever-popular yuzu, the intense orange-like “iyokan”, and the bright grapefruit-esque “hassaku” - perhaps our favourite. Being even more characterful than before, we naturally wanted to represent this through an updated and impactful design, and we think our design partners Stout Collective definitely captured the intense character visually here as well!