Seattle Breweries Unite for Crikey Month, Celebrating the American IPA

Grab a punch card at the Ballard or Downtown taproom before this Saturday. Reuben's Brews has structured April into something genuinely useful for anyone trying to understand what a well-built American IPA actually tastes like, and the Saturday Series is the backbone of it: every Saturday this month, a new limited-edition version of Crikey IPA drops at both locations. Four Saturdays, four distinct takes on the same foundational recipe, with Crikey Day officially anchoring the month on April 18.

This is the kind of tasting curriculum you normally have to design yourself.

The base beer is worth knowing cold before you start. Crikey clocks in at 6.8% ABV and 53 IBUs, built on a four-malt grist of pale, Munich, wheat, and caramel. The hop charge is six varieties: Citra, Amarillo, Simcoe, Centennial, Mosaic, and Azacca. That combination is a blueprint for the modern West Coast IPA house style — Citra and Mosaic carrying the tropical and citrus top notes, Simcoe and Centennial anchoring the resinous pine mid-palate, Amarillo pulling grapefruit and orange into the finish, and Azacca adding the guava and stone fruit that keeps the bitterness from flattening out. At 53 IBUs, it lands bitter but not punishing, which is precisely the recipe decision that founder Adam Robbings said drove the original design: fruit-forward and layered rather than maximally bitter.

The award record makes Crikey a useful reference point rather than just local pride. It won a silver at the World Beer Championships in 2014, was named Best North American Beer at the 2020 Brussels Beer Challenge, and most recently took Grand Champion at the 2025 United States Beer Tasting Championship. That's a consistent cross-continental result over more than a decade, and it means you're tasting against a well-documented benchmark.

For the DIY angle, the Saturday Series sets up an easy blind ranking. Taste each week's variant back-to-back with a pour of the core Crikey. You're looking for what changed and why. If a variant leads with more pronounced tropical fruit and less pine, the brewer likely leaned on Mosaic and Azacca and pulled back on Simcoe. If the finish is drier, look for a reduced caramel addition or a different yeast attenuation target. Bring a notebook, not your phone. The contextual serving notes from the bartenders on release days are genuinely informative at Reuben's — ask specifically which hops were adjusted and whether the dry-hop rate changed.

Two established variants give you additional data points. Double Crikey is the same hop blend scaled into DIPA territory, heavier body and more pronounced bitterness, which isolates how the grain bill interacts with the hop character at higher ABV. Fresh Hop Crikey, the seasonal version brewed each fall with wet Amarillo from the Yakima Valley, shows what that single variety smells like before it's been kiln-dried, a grassy, intensely floral version of the citrus note you get from the pellet in the core recipe.

The punch card covers all four Saturday releases. Complete it and you're entered for prizes, but the more practical return is four weeks of comparative sensory data on one of the most decorated IPAs in the Pacific Northwest.