Backstory:

As Brewmaster Darron Welch explains it, “The reason Kiwanda is a whirlpool-only beer has to do with the early process of developing this beer. Initially, the beer had a more conventional formula, although still heavily weighted towards finishing hops for emphasis on hop aroma character rather than bitterness. Early batches hit the aroma targets but seemed too bitter from sensory work. Since Pelican has used outside lab services almost from the beginning of our operations, I sent samples off and confirmed that the beer was too bitter for the designed target specification.

“Wanting to keep the aromatic presence of the beer intact, I started gradually reducing the base bittering addition and the mid-kettle addition incrementally, getting laboratory feedback all along the way. It got to the point where my adjustments of kettle hops were having basically no impact on perceived or measured bitterness, so I simply abandoned them entirely. Subsequent testing showed that by eliminating all kettle hops and doing only the whirlpool addition, I not only hit the measured IBU specification, but more importantly, I was getting the balance of flavor, aroma, and bitterness that I had imagined when designing the beer in the first place.

“Hops added partway through the boil — 15–30 minutes of boil time — will tend to give more bitterness than might be traditionally expected, and not as much aroma as with a whirlpool addition. Part of it has to do with the overall design of the beer and the formulation.”