New Zealand IPA - Tasting Results/Review

Our New Zealand IPA didn't turn out quite how we expected, but still surprisingly good. Spoiler alert: it won an award in a homebrewing competition!

Introduction

Homebrewing is full of learning opportunities and surprises, and this beer certainly gave us both of these things. Straight up, we were a little disappointed with how this beer turned out, but we decided to enter it into a competition anyway in order to get some detailed feedback, although we had a pretty good idea where it went wrong. More on this shortly. This "review" won't be particulary detailed or in-depth but wanted to publish at least something as a reference for us to come back to (and for anyone following along on our brewing journey)

Appearance

The colour is probably a little light for a true American IPA style. With only munich malt and pale malt for the grist, it was never going to be particularly dark, but after some time in the keg it's dropped almost crystal clear and pours with a nice, pure white head with decent retention.

Aroma

The aroma on this one is decent with some nice tropical fruit and floral notes coming through from the hops. There is however an all-too-familiar, but also very hard to describe aroma that we think has come through from the US-05 yeast.

Flavour

Considering the amount of hops that went into this beer, the hop aroma is simply lacking in our opinion. This has been something we've struggled with for quite some time with our hop-forward beer styles, and we've finally concluded that the culprit is US-05 yeast. We've dedicated an entire separate post to this, which you can read here. There's also a subtle sweet, almost honey-like off flavour, that like the aroma is difficult to describe. It's not a common off flavour (ie. not diacetyl, acetaldehyde etc) but something we've encountered on several beers in the past.

Competition Entry

Although this beer didn't turn out as the hop-forward IPA we originally set out to make, it wasn't particularly "bad", but we just didn't particularly enjoy it. We decided to enter it into the 2026 Flatrock Brew Comp anyway, but classified it as an American Pale Ale instead of an American IPA, and it ended up taking 3rd place in the category.

An absolute surprise to us, but we'll certainly take it. Scoresheet for this beer from the competition is below if you're interested.

As you can see above, the beer scored 33/50 and 36/50, for a combined/average score of 34/50

Conclusion

We'll certainly take the award for this one, and it just goes to show that even beers that don't turn out exactly as planned aren't necessarily "bad". As a matter of due course, we're planning to re-brew this one with a different yeast strain to hopefully create something more in line with what we're expecting.

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