If you grew up at a certain time and are of a certain age, my expectation and hope is that the title of today’s post elicited any amount of excitement, nostalgia, and maybe even a bit of jealousy.
I know I was when I saw this project first announced. If you aren’t familiar with Voltron, why? But why?
Voltron: Defender of the Universe was a classic 1980’s cartoon that ran for 124 episodes over three seasons between 1984 and 1985. It is classically known for what is referred to as Lion Voltron, and is an edited and localized version of the Japanese anime Hyaku Jūō Goraion, or Beast King GoLion.
In a nutshell, this edited version of Voltron takes place on a different planet as five pilots control five different gigantic lion robots who come together to form the mighty warrior Voltron, defending their home planet against the evil King Zarkon.
Standard 80’s kids fare.
While our heroes are off battling intergalactic villains, the rights to Voltron are held by WEP, based in St. Louis. Those rights holders are big fans of Four Hands Brewing, just downtown, and while our episode of the Florida Beer Podcast featuring an interview with Four Hands CEO Kevin Lemp did a lot of world building into how this project came to be.
Basically, the Voltron series is five beers, each beer being a collaboration with a different brewery from around the country and featuring one of the five lions that make up the legendary defender.
Another good friend of the St. Louis area and Four Hands in general is Ignacio Montenegro, co-founder of Tripping Animals Brewery in Doral. They got the blue lion and Volume Five Hazy IPA (Hazy IPA, 7% ABV).
As a hazy, obviously this is a great reason to bring Tripping Animals into the project, since they are well known for their expertise in the field. It pours a medium orange color and is completely opaque, literally no way to see anything through it.
The aroma is quite nice with big tropical fruit notes. Definitely a lot of pineapple, papaya, and guava at play in the notes here.
The flavor continues those tropical notes. The pineapple and guava are very well present, but there’s also a solid floral resin quality at play here that is very present. While I’ve noticed that Cashmere hops aren’t necessarily the most bitter on the planet, if you play with Citra and Idaho Gem the way that they did here, that tends to be where some of that bitterness really comes from. That bitterness carries through on an almost milky sort of mouthfeel and creamy aspect in the flavor, but the fruit is ever present and the bitterness a little bit more so.
Now obviously each of these five collaborations have now been released, featuring a different lion on their own. The expected end of this project is Volume 6, a barrel-aged collaboration between all breweries involved.
When will that come out? That remains to be seen. But with any luck, we will get the information on that very soon.
Once that happens, I shall repeat my question to Kevin that I did at the end of the podcast: When do we start working on the vehicle Voltron series?
Drink Florida Craft,
Dave
@floridabeerblog
[email protected]
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