Beer of the Week: Suited Aces

From the Beer Writer: It’s common for chefs or restaurants to have a signature ingredient, a flavorful additive they’re known for which makes it into their menus in a variety of ways. The same phenomena happens with breweries. When this takes place, it’s usually a hop varietal that finds its way into a number of different beers. Most beer fans have their favorite hops, so it only makes sense that brewers (beer fans at heart) do, as well. But what does a beermaker do when their go-to hop becomes hard to get? That’s a quandary many a brewer have contended with, including Five Suits Brewing’s co-founding head brewer Nick Corona, who had an epiphanic experience when he first used Nectaron hops to brew a hazy IPA. He loved the unique blend of fruity aromas and flavors that New Zealand-bred varietal threw off…and so did his customers. Though released just a few months before 2021’s San Diego Beer News Awards, fans voted that beer, Planet Nectaron, the best hazy IPA in San Diego County. Nectaron has since made it into a second Five Suits NEIPA as well as this week’s featured beer, Suited Aces, an unfiltered IPA that, like its N-hopped predecessors, has gained a fast following. Problem is, Nectaron is extremely tough to come by, which led Corona to augment Suited Aces’ hop bill using an easier-to-procure hop offering complimentary characteristics. For this beer, which smells of peach and mango, and offers both on the palate along with a lasting orange hard-candy quality, he went with Idaho 7. Often described as a “tangerine hop”, Idaho 7 marries well with the “nectarine hop”, adding sweet-citrus atop big stone-fruit and providing added complexity that would be missing were this a single-hop (albeit a really good single-hop) creation.

From the Brewer: “It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of Nectaron hops. While it hasn’t been easy or cheap to get our hands on some, we knew this hop was going to be worth the effort ever since we saw what it was capable of in our hazy IPA, Planet Nectaron. In looking to develop our next series of beers, specifically IPAs, we set out to combine this incredibly potent hop with some of the more common and popular hop varietals out there. Thankfully, our brewery owner is also the head brewer, and the freedom to brew what we feel our guests want is right at our finger tips. When we developed the recipe for our unfiltered American IPA, Suited Aces, we wanted to take some of the same attributes from our Planet Nectaron and lean a little heavier towards brewing a bitter American-style IPA, while retaining as much of the pungent aromatics that we get out of our hazy. We decided to work in some Idaho 7 hops and basically settled on a 50/50 combo across the board. While Nectaron gives us plenty of those tropical, stone-fruit touches, we wanted to work in the light citrus and tangerine notes that comes with the Idaho 7. We engineered our water profile more towards a West Coast IPA to get that initial bittering punch, but we were also looking to capture that soft roll off the tongue as the beer finishes. The aromatics of this beer really come through since Nectaron doesn’t know the meaning of subtlety. The Idaho 7 really added that light citrus flavor that we were looking for, and we couldn’t be more excited about how this beer has been received. Our choice to leave this beer unfiltered really came in at the end as we loved the slightly creamy mouthfeel and didn’t want to strip out any of the flavors that we got from our dry-hop. We love a clear beer and we pride ourselves in fining, but we also recognize when things are better left untouched. This beer was one of those beers. This has quickly become our go-to shift beer as it checks all the boxes in what we love about IPAs.”—Nick Corona, Co-founder & Head Brewer, Five Suits Brewing