Little Thistle Double Elbow Wagon Lager

 

Little Thistle Double Elbow Wagon Lager Dry-hopped Wheat Lager. Collaboration w/ Live Oak Brewing, Austin, Texas.

Lightly hazed, bright yellow, ivory head atop. 

In the nose: fresh & hoppy, notes of citrus, slight floral.

In the mouth: big hops at the start, with lemony flavor coming through. Crisp and, mostly, clean. Refreshing, with more flavor and body than a typical lager, which this is not. Exceptionally smooth. Quite tasty. 

Sometimes stories take on lives of their own. "Wagon Lager" started as "Lithuanian Wagon Lager" many years ago, a fictional tale about an apocryphal style of heavily-hopped lager brewed primarily with wheat malt by Baltic pioneers in wagons. Where were they coming from or going to? Not sure, but their destination was well-supplied with choice wheat and hops. Being chill folks, they decided to roll with it, and a new tradition was born.

To date, Double Elbow has been a project that attempts to faithfully recreate foundational styles. You can look at Wagon Lager one of two ways - either we've jumped the shark a bit here, or we're productively expanding the definition of "foundational." We're ok with whichever. 

Brewed in collaboration with my good friends and former co-workers at Live Oak Brewing in Austin, TX, Wagon Lager is a crispy clean, smooth-brewed lager hopped intensively with low-alpha Crystal on the hot side, and dry hopped with the best Cascade Cryo and Simcoe I could lay my hands on. I spent months working on a top-secret hoppy lager at Live Oak in 2012, code-named Hop Sodie, and I'm proud to say that Wagon Lager is its true spiritual successor. 

Or maybe it's just a West Coast Pils with a lot of wheat malt. Either way, you should drink it. 

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