Twenty-seven is a lot of beers to keep making under one name, but that is exactly where Icicle Brewing Company finds itself with the latest entry in its Enchantments Hazy IPA rotator series. Named after the famously stunning Enchantments alpine zone near the brewery's Leavenworth home, this series has become a running experiment in how many different directions a hazy IPA can be pushed while keeping the same core identity.
Release No. 27 throws a genuinely stacked hop bill at the wall: Nectaron, Motueka, Citra, and Mosaic, all working together to produce a fruit bowl's worth of aroma and flavor, orange, mango, passion fruit, peach, grapefruit, and pineapple all showing up across the glass. At 6.9% ABV, it has enough weight behind it to carry that much hop character without losing shape, landing somewhere between a dessert and a proper session-breaker.
Leavenworth itself is part of the story here. Icicle's founders, Pam and Oliver Brulotte, first arrived in town in 2001 to open a Bavarian-style grill and beer garden, years before they ever got into brewing. Leavenworth had rebuilt itself as a Bavarian-themed alpine village decades earlier, and it always felt a little incomplete without a hometown brewery to match the postcard scenery. Icicle filled that gap in 2011, and the rotator series has become one of the clearest ways the brewery keeps its lineup feeling fresh without straying from what put it on the map in the first place.
What makes a rotator series like this fun to follow is the sheer variety hidden inside a consistent format. Every release uses a different hop combination, so regulars get to watch the brewers' hop preferences shift in real time, almost like a lookbook of whatever New Zealand or Pacific Northwest varieties have caught their attention that particular month. No. 27 firmly lands in the fruit-forward, crowd-pleasing camp.
This one is rolling out later this month on draft and in 4-packs of 16oz cans across Washington. If you have been meaning to catch up on the Enchantments series, No. 27 is as good a place to jump back in as any, and the artwork alone, all golden autumn ridgelines, is worth a look even before the first sip.