Every year, like a swallow returning to Capistrano, or an uncle returning to the same joke at Thanksgiving, Shakedown Street comes back around to Pivotal Brewing Company. This is its annual revolution around the sun, timed perfectly to land right as the brewery's Bristol, Rhode Island taproom gears up for Dead Fest, three days of tribute bands, food trucks, and presumably a fair amount of tie-dye.
What makes this year's lap interesting is the hop. Pivotal has built this batch around Alora, a variety bred by the folks at Hopsteiner specifically to carry an unusual composition of hop oils. Brewed with 100% Alora, this hazy IPA comes in at 6.2% ABV and reads less like a beer list and more like a fruit stand: huge aromas of peach, melon, and yuzu, finished off with a subtle citrus snap. It's the kind of hop profile that makes you double check you didn't accidentally order a smoothie.
Despite all that tropical fanfare, Pivotal insists it stays clean and crushable, which is doing some heavy lifting for a beer built almost entirely out of stone fruit aromatics. Complex without getting exhausting is a difficult needle to thread, but a decade of dialing in New England IPAs will do that for a brewery.
Pivotal itself has quietly become a fixture of the Bristol beer scene, the kind of place that treats a beer release and a Grateful Dead cover band as equally important parts of the same weekend, which, frankly, is the correct set of priorities. Shakedown Street lands on draft and in cans to go on Friday, just in time for the full Dead Fest lineup to take over the taproom.
So if you find yourself in Bristol this weekend with Uncle Jon's Jam on one side and a pint of stone-fruit-forward hazy IPA on the other, know that both were clearly planned with the same amount of care, and neither one is going to apologize for it.