There’s a whole new year’s worth of hops in store for the Spice of Life series! We’ve just put the finishing touches on the calendar of hops for each month, with their tasting notes. Many of these hops are extremely rare and never been used for Sixpoint beers, so we’re as excited as anyone else to taste our way through them all over the next year.

Our last rotation of twelve hops — ending this June with Crystal — focused mostly on American-grown hops (with some rarities along the way, like Nelson Sauvin), so we thought we’d overhaul the calendar this year and dominate it with lesser-known hop varieties for American craft beer. To that end, we’ve teamed with a New Zealand-based hop collective for many of them, to bring the flavors of Pacifica, Wakatu, and other New Zealand hops to this beer series. The decision to procure these exotic hops was not for lack of variety and flavor in American hops. They’ll be included into this year’s calendar as well, such as varieties like Glacier, Citra and the old standby Cascade. In the true spirit of ongoing formulations, we wanted to continue the series with a dynamic, and dramatically different group of hops to broaden our palates, and hopefully many of yours, with.

photo: Michael Harlan Turkell

One thing that will also be changing for the 2012-2013 Spice of Life series is the beer recipe that each of these hops will be featured in.  Our subtle pale malt base will be lightly tweaked to better feature the hop profile. We’ve also been introducing the Spice of Life series to more bars, in more areas. Starting July 1, you can try every new Spice of Life Series beer in bars throughout NYC, and all other other cities where Sixpoint is poured. We’ve also created some new Spice of Life glassware for these accounts to serve the series in. Waft the hops’ aromas from these tulip-shaped glasses, shown above.