Beer of the Week: Rain Delay

In the earliest days of the American craft-beer revolution, most production breweries didn’t have public venues, so early-adopting enthusiasts’ best bet for encountering an extensive lineup of handcrafted beers was at brewpubs. Such venues would present what, at the time, seemed like an almost infinite list of ales and lagers (but mostly ales). In reality, most brewpub menus included between six and a dozen brews, but it seemed like way more. That’s because each beer on offer was a distinctly different style: blonde, Pilsner, bitter, hefeweizen, amber, pale, Scottish, porter, stout and maybe, maybe, an IPA. Just one IPA? Unbelievable, right? But that’s how it was back then. It’s only in the past decade-and-a-half that the style’s popularity and brewers’ experimentation with different hop varietals and substyles led to most breweries having as many IPAs on tap as early brewpubs offered in toto. Being of a certain age and having come up as a beer nerd in a different era, you may think I’m about to launch into a curmudgeonly rant, but I happen to love that so many IPA options abound on today’s brewery tap lists. With so many different hop varietals and emerging hop products, it’s immensely interesting to see what modern-day brewers can do with them. And brewers feel the same. Consumer demand for multiple IPAs creates an environment where fermentationists go beyond their flagship IPAs and continue exploring different hop combinations, substyles (hazy, cold, black) and alcohol levels (imperial, session and super-session). In doing so, many have created IPAs they like just as much or even more than their OGs, which is really cool and the case with this week’s featured beer, Rain Delay. A West Coast IPA from Sunny Grove Brewing, it currently shares tap space with the Santee business’ core hop-bomb Hammerhead. The latter is much beloved by the brewery’s regulars, but those devout barstool-sitters are making space in their hearts for the recently released Rain Delay. And I can see why. Right in the sweet-spot in terms of texture and mid-level alcohol, this IPA is big on citrus with lemon candy, tangerine and orange pith on display. It’s both delicious and refreshing, perfect for sating the deep thirsts of East County denizens.

Rain Delay is a West Coast IPA coming in at 6.8% ABV (alcohol-by-volume). For this one, I kept the body very light to really let the hops shine, using a mix of German Pilsner and Canadian 2-row malts, and keeping all the hops in the whirlpool and dry-hop. I used a large charge of Simcoe and Idaho 7 along with some Columbus Lupocore. This combination gives big grapefruit, passionfruit and tropical-fruit notes up front, with some dank, piney resin notes to round it out at the end. It’s been a hit in the taproom and one of my favorite West Coast IPAs we’ve brewed so far.”

Scott Christian, Co-owner & Head Brewer, Sunny Grove Brewing