CARLSBAD, CA (May 23, 2017) - Callaway's epic year continues with the release of its new Epic and Epic Pro Irons. Following up on the successful launch of the Callaway Epic and Epic Sub Zero drivers, and the Technology Innovation Award presented by AmateurGolf.com at the PGA Merchandise Show in Florida, Callaway has announced that its newest irons will be available June 16.

For anyone who is, has or knows a father, that's two days before Father's Day.

Callaway has been the #1 Iron in golf since the beginning of 2015. And with the Epic and Epic Pro Irons, they are trying to stay there by taking a new approach to an old concept.

The concept comes from what made the Epic driver so successful: making the face more flexible by stabilizing the framework that supports it.

The new approach came from Callaway's CEO Chip Brewer and the head of Research and Development (and 3 handicapper) Dr. Alan Hocknell. Brewer posed to Hocknell the question that anyone in his position would love to hear: If you were to create your "dream iron", with no limit on time, materials, or cost, what would it be?

And so Hocknell set out to create a player’s shaped head that for the first time incorporated all of Callaway’s best performance-enhancing technologies: Face Cup for increased ball speed; Standing Wave for easy launch; Exo-cage body structure for increased forgiveness. The result would combine the sleek appearance, feel and workability of a player’s iron with the distance and forgiveness of a game improvement iron.

The result is a smaller club head size favored by better and low-handicap players, with a lower center of gravity in the long irons for easy launch and high, long carry, and a higher center of gravity in the short irons for lower, more controllable flight.

"We have not used this technique before, but we had to go to these extremes in order to get the amount of weight movement that we needed in the small format of a 'Pro'-shaped iron," Hocknell said.

"It was a very, very difficult iron to make as it turns out. We set out to give this iron more ball speed than even our standard Apex irons, which are known as really long and really forgiving. We wanted a pro-type shape and size of the iron to have all of those advantages and more, and I think we got there."

The Epic and Epic Pro irons will be available June 16 and will come standard with Project X LZ steel shafts and New Decade Platinum grips for $250 each or with UST Mamiya Recoil graphite shafts $280 each.

The Callaway Epic line also adds a hybrid.