The Quint
Commenting about one style of muscular ale back in 2013, I wrote, “Very strong beers aren’t new, but the name “quadrupel” is; La Trappe coined the term to describe a beer that has some of the darkness of those other dark abbey ales, but enough amber-orange luminosity to connect it to popular tripels… No brewery has yet tried to pioneer a quintupel. Yet.” I thought of that when I received a package from San Diego’s Pure Project containing two regular IPAs, a triple IPA, and Cataclysmic Event, a quintuple. The quint cometh!
Pure Project isn’t the first brewery to make a quint. For its fifth anniversary, Karbach made one back in 2016. A Google search turns up a few others over the years, though that appears to be the earliest. The ABV range runs from 13% to 18%, which I guess makes Pure Project’s about average, at 15%. We’ve shot past the great ABV wars of the early teens, and still it’s surprising in this world of one-offs and experiments that there aren’t more quints. (There are at least two sextuples out there, but they are an anemic 9% and I suspect the name rather than heft is what attracted the breweries in those cases. Teenage boy laugh: “You said sex.”)
Pure Project is a highly experimental brewery, and they tend to favor IPAs in the ultra-juicy vein. The triple IPA they sent, Shake the Ground, was so sweet and juicy it tasted like a cocktail—it even had a rum-and-coconut cast. In this vein of brewing, the sweetness of alcohol acts as a wingman to the hops in goosing the juiciness. So I was intrigued by the quint. Could a beer keep getting juicier with strength, or was there a point of diminishing return?
I reached out to the brewery’s Chris Leguizamon to find out more. I was especially curious how they prepared the mash and how much dextrose they might have used. Those details Pure Project keeps on the downlow. But Chris did add this:
It is Pure Project's biggest celebration of hops in a beer. We use 8.5 lbs per barrel in the dry hop. The hops are hand-selected Nelson Sauvin from Freestyle Farms in NZ, a highly sought-after Riwaka, and Citra Cryo from YCH. The yeast we use is our house Murky yeast just like Murkwood. In my opinion, we have been really understanding the limits and comfortability of our house Murky yeast strain.
It was a well-made beer, and I really admired how the brewers managed to keep the body mostly IPA-like. With that much strength, it’s extremely hard not to have a massive perception of barley. I mean, 15% is well past most barley wines. Pure’s yeast strain is also incredibly hardy. Even at 15%, it wasn’t producing much in the way of higher alcohols—and at lower ABVs, it handily conceals the sting altogether.
Yet I was surprised to hear about the hop load, and here we come to the crux of the matter: it wasn’t that hoppy. The hops read as mostly dank, with a bit of orange rind. Their flavor impact was vastly smaller than in the triple IPA. The brewery provides tasting/aroma notes on the hops and suggests apricot, peach ring, kumquat, lychee, and papaya, and they may be there if you scan long enough. But reading those words make you think the flavors will be ultra-saturated and intense. If we created a hop-intensity measure of 1-10, Pure’s triple IPA would register a seismic 10. But the quint would come in around three or four.
The malts, even trimmed and tucked, are just too dense. Although it was subdued, there was that unmistakeable leather quality strong beers exude. Brewers often engineer IPAs to score high on hop intensity, and alcohol helps to a point. Shake the Ground would be a good piece of evidence that 10% is still in the sweet spot. Pure Project also makes a range of quad IPAs, and I I’ll have to track one down to see where the line is. Maybe breweries can push it even higher. (Eleven on the hop-intensity scale?) But at fifteen the beer becomes something else—more about the booze and malt than the hops.
Of the three beers the brewery sent, Murkwood, a standard IPA (7%), was the one that really thrilled me. It was saturated and juicy, but not crazy juicy. The tropical fruit flavors had a bit more room to express themselves, and at that strength, the brewers were even able to soften the edges. It was like floating in a cloud made of mango and lemon/passion fruit.
Humans like a thrill, so people will try the Cataclysmic Event. My guess is that after the rush, however, they’ll happily return to their Murkwoods. We may like a thrill, but only sometimes. Usually we want something balanced and accomplished. Still, I was happy to finally try a quint.