What this is
An American pale ale in name and a New Zealand one in practice: Riwaka and Nectaron over a Gladfield base, at 7% and 82 IBU. Nominally 18B, comfortably above it in strength.
This was one of the first recipes written from scratch rather than followed, and it was built around a single constraint.
No crystal malt
The brief was to get real interest into the grain without reaching for a caramel malt. Crystal is the obvious way to add colour, body and a sweet malt note to a pale ale, and it is also the easiest way to make one taste sticky and one-dimensional — the sugars it contributes are largely unfermentable, so what you gain in body you pay for in a beer that finishes heavier than it should.
The answer here is Gladfield Aurora at 12%, backed by Vienna at 17%. Aurora is a kilned malt rather than a stewed one, so it brings bready depth and a faint orange cast without the residual sweetness. Vienna adds melanoidin character from the base side. Between them the beer gets colour and malt presence and still finishes at 1.012.
No crystal, no caramel, no Carahell. That constraint has held across all five brews in the lineage, including the reworked fourth.
The lineage
The grain bill above ran unchanged across four brews — I, II, III and the one Owen made in April 2024. Only the hops and yeast moved: Riwaka alone at 200 g for the first two, Nectaron added from the third, and the yeast walking US-05 → BRY-97 → Pomona.
Resurgence IV, in November 2024, is the outlier and the reason this rather than IV is canonical. It reworked the grain completely — American Ale down to 3.1 kg, Vienna up to 2.91, Aurora trimmed to 0.65 — shifting the malt interest from Aurora-led to Vienna-led, and brought Mosaic in alongside a reduced Riwaka charge. Interesting, and still crystal-free, but one brew against four is not yet a new canonical.
Brewing it
Mash at 67°C. The Aurora and Vienna already contribute body, so there is no need to mash high on top of them.
The hop schedule is back-loaded: 180 g of the 300 g total goes in as a five-day dry hop, with only 55 g in the boil before the ten-minute mark. Riwaka in particular loses its best character to heat, so keep it late.