Other Half DDH Small Galaxy Everything: On beer, Bundesliga and the joy of new discovery
The beer: Other Half DDH Small Galaxy Everything
ABV: 6.5%
How we got it: Purchased as part of a recent delivery order from Other Half Brewery’s Brooklyn location. More important than how we got it is how we drank it — while watching the return of major professional soccer, oh yar!
Photo via Other Half Brewing Company
What they say: A double dry-hopped American IPA. “Kind of hard to believe we’ve never made a Galaxy version of this beer,” the brewery says. “Problem corrected.”
What you say: This beer has a 4.28 rating on Beer Advocate and a 4.21 on Untappd.
What Mike says —
A corona times conundrum: Most sports fans have been missing live sports, including your humble correspondent. Maybe not all Knicks fans.
So when it was announced that major competitive sport would return in May in the form of Germany’s top-flight soccer league — the Bundesliga! — I was excited.
Before these corona times I don’t think that I had ever watched a Bundesliga match, at least not on purpose. However, I was primed to explore a new soccer league. For the past year, I had put a lot of effort into getting into the world’s most exciting soccer league: the English Premier League. And I didn’t just casually get into it — I let my obsessive nature take hold and I really got into it.
I adopted a Premier League team to support (Tottenham Hotspur), watched and re-watched English soccer documentaries, I even read a book on the business of the English Premier League. Furthermore, I also started following the EFL Championship and EFL League One. That’s the second tier and third-tier leagues of soccer in England. I went deep.
When I heard about the Bundesliga return my immediate thoughts were: right, I’ll do research, develop some rooting interests, and obsess over these Deutschland squads, too — at least until soccer in England gets back underway. So I combed the Reddit threads recommending teams to support (Union Berlin is a fun cult team to get behind; Dortmund might actually challenge the mighty Bayern who are going for their 8th consecutive league title; or you can also just root for anyone against Bayern because they’re going for their 8th consecutive league title). I devoured an excellent four-part doc on Borussia Dortmund. I consulted the TV schedule for the first weekend of action — did you know that Fox Sports broadcasts at least six German soccer games a week in the US? I did not — and prioritized which matches to watch.
When the Bundesliga re-kicked-off its 2019/20 season in the second week of May I was ready for it. Most importantly, I had a new beer to mark the occasion: Other Half DDH Small Galaxy Everything. I sipped the SGE and watched the rivals from the Ruhr region Borussia Dortmund and Schalke face off in the Revierderby. The game wasn’t particularly competitive — Dortmund throttled Schalke, 4-nil — but at the same time the game was exciting because this was new and brought me joy.
Ok, finally, let’s talk about the beer: The Small Galaxy Everything is one of these super-charged hoppy concoctions bestowed with the badge DDH. Double dry hopped.
First, what is dry hopping you wonder?
It’s like this: During the brewing process, hops are added before the boil to impart bitterness in the brew. But if a brewer wants to get wild, later in the process they can add more hops. As We Are Brew Studs observes, when a brewer “wants to showcase foresty, tropical, candied hop notes, they toss more into the fermentation tank days after the brew.” That second part of the process is dry hopping and that is awesome.
And that other D in the DDH that ensures you’re doubling your dry hopping, that seems to be simple enough to explain. “It essentially means dry hopping twice, or [hopping with] twice as much hops,” Scott Ungermann, brewmaster at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, told VinePair.com for an article aptly titled, WTH is DDH. Of course, as Ungermann observes, there are different ways to double. “HopRocket, hopback, our Taco Cat — new methods of dry hopping just keep coming,” he adds. Nothing with beer is simple, and that’s why we love it.
Consider next the G in the Other Half DDH Small Galaxy Everything: Galaxy hops.
Here’s what Hoplist has to say about this strain, “It has an amazing citrus, peach and passionfruit aroma, especially when used as a late addition. The flavor is often quite intense upon production but mellows as it matures.” Late addition? You don’t say. Sounds kind of perfect for double dry hopping. It’s all coming to fruition.
The verdict, this beer is bursting with haze and flavor. No surprise since we got it fresh — just days off the canning line — so there was little to no opportunity for any of the hop flavors to fade. The DDH is working at max power. A fine brew to embark on our discovery of the art of double dry hopping.
Michael Davies, cohost of the biggest soccer podcast in the world, Men In Blazers, summed up the American soccer fan’s passion for the Premier League perfectly in an episode last year. In describing this passion, Davies — an Englishman — said for Americans developing your football fandom is about “discovery.”
To me, what Davies is talking about here is the joy that comes with learning and developing a passion for something new. It’s about investing in learning about and relishing in the enjoyment of gaining new knowledge — that can be said as much for soccer as for developing a taste and know-how about double dry-hopped beer.