Ballast Point Brewing Co. Big Eye IPA

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Well, when in California, do as the Californians do, and drink IPA! After a long day (was up at 5:00AM and out the door by 6:00) at Joshua Tree National Park (INCREDIBLE!) and the Salton Sea (EERIE!) I returned to my “cell” at the Waldorf-Astoria La Quinta Resort and cracked open a bomber of Ballast Point Big Eye IPA.

While last night’s Lagunitas IPA  was surprisingly balanced for a West Coast IPA, Big Eye fits a little more of the stereotype of hop-forward Left Coast beers. This beer clocks in at a cool 6.8%ABV and I was drinking it from my little hotel wine glass (decent shape for beer, and it’s glass, so no complaints here!).

The pour was a nice, hazy, orangey-gold color with decent head retention. Aroma is malty with a good amount of citrus hops. Enjoyed next to the pool (which was 5 feet from my hotel room door on a 79° January day with zero humidity) it seems like the perfect beer! LOL It is very hop forward and has a LOOOOOONG lingering bitter hops aftertaste, which I happen to enjoy. A bomber is a little much for me to handle of this beer, though, what with palate fatigue and all.

The hops are slightly resiny and plenty piney, but the dominant characteristic is straight-up West Coast grapefruit pith. Eat some of that white stuff that is between the peel and fruit of a grapefruit, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Big Eye tastes like, especially in the long aftertaste (but in a good way). Balance it with some malt and you have a nice IPA to be enjoyed on what could only be considered a perfect day.

Lagunitas IPA

Photo courtesy of theperfectlyhappyman.com

Sometimes my life is pretty darn good. Right now I’m typing this blog from my hotel room at the Waldorf-Astoria La Quinta Resort  outside of Palm Springs, CA, where I am enjoying my nice in-room fireplace (takes a little chill out of the desert air) in my poolside casita. Reality will return when I spend all day Sunday in the airport, getting home around 1Am and working all day Monday, but for now I get to enjoy a little slice of high living!

I just happened to spot a little hole-in-the-wall liquor store on my way out of Palm Springs and I stopped to see if they had anything good. For the ridiculous price of $24 I am now the proud owner of one bomber each of Alesmith X, Ballast Point IPA and Lagunitas IPA. Sheesh!

I chose the Lagunitas for a nightcap, and it’s great! I was expecting a hop bomb because the guys at Lagunitas certainly don’t mess around when it comes to hops, but to my  surprise it is very nicely balanced and the hops are quite restrained, especially for a West Coast IPA.

My bomber poured a clear gold with little to no head. The aroma is malty with a little citrus tone, and the flavor is a wonderfully balanced malt with resiny hops flavors. This is a great IPA and it’s not just the pool and fireplace coloring my impressions!

Hop Ottin’ IPA: Nice Cans Series

On my last beer run (which is going to be my last for a LONG time… I have WAAAYYYY too many beers in the “cellar” that need to be drunk before I buy anything more. I know I said the same last year, but this is serious now) I picked up some cans for the “Hey, Babe, Nice Cans!” series and Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s Hop Ottin’ IPA was one I picked up (see my last review for my impression of the canned Summer Solstice).

Again, longtime readers know I am still enamored with the idea of craft beers in cans! LOL Cans are a great medium for beers for many, many reasons, but IPA’s do particularly well in cans because there is no chance of light or air hitting the beer, both of which are bad for high-hopped beers especially.

I’ve had this beer in the bottle, but for some reason have never reviewed it. Hop Ottin’ weighs in at 7% ABV and 80 IBU’s (the measure for bitterness used by brewers). Unfortunately, the AVBC website offers virtually no information about what’s in the beer, so all we know based on the site is that it has “Pacific Northwest hops,” which could be anything since virtually all hops used in production brewing come from the PNW.

If there is one thing that California brewers all have in common is the love of HUGE, ultra-hopped IPA’s. Balance? We don’t need no stinking balance here on the Left Coast!

Hop Ottin’ pours a cloudy dark orange/amber-ish color with a huge, thick shaving cream like head. Head retention is massive on this beer and I even had an island of thick head that floated on the beer and never went away. Big heads come from big hops, generally.

The aroma is hop forward, with that piney, resiny type of hop character loved by many of the West Coast brewers. I didn’t get many floral or citrus notes from the aroma. They were earthy and there was a lot of pine tree in there, too.

Not surprisingly, the flavor was the same. Earthy, resiny, piney notes from beginning to end, and a lot of hop bitterness. The first 25% of the taste has pretty good balance with the malts, but then the hops wave comes crashing in and carries into a long, bitter aftertaste. There is nice carbonation in this beer and it’s quite an easy drinker despite the high bitterness. At this alcohol level and bitterness level trying to take down a 6-pack of this at a party or during a game would be a bad idea and would quickly lead to palate fatigue, but this is a good, solid, enjoyable IPA. After my disappointment with Summer Solstice, my love of AVBC has been restored! A great beer, probably tough to drink in volume, but sprinkling some cans in among the lighter fare for a day at the pool or camping would be a top notch idea.

New Holland Brewing Co. – Farmhouse Hatter

As many of you readers know, New Holland Brewing Co. is a brewery near and dear to my heart. I used to live a few blocks from the brewpub in Holland, MI, and in many ways New Holland was my “gateway” brewery into the wonderful world of craft beer.

We recently went to the AWESOME Beer Kitchen in Westport and I enjoyed a Farmhouse Hatter on tap there. Mad Hatter is New Holland’s year-round IPA, but the brewery does a LOT of experimenting from the Hatter platform… over the years I’ve had variations that include the imperial version, a black Hatter and even a smoked version, as well as this “farmhouse” style.

Farmhouse Hatter is a Belgian IPA/pale ale version of this popular beer. Belgian beers are all the rage these days, and I’ve had three Belgian IPA’s I’m aware of. A couple of years ago I reviewed Great Divide’s Belgica, and I’ll have a review of an Iowa brewery’s offering in this style, too.

New Holland modified its Mad Hatter recipe with wheat and pilsner malts and then used a Belgian Saison yeast to give it its Belgian characteristics. The result is quite pleasant, with an ABV of 5.8% and good balance.

The one problem I seem to have with Belgian IPA’s is the interplay between hops and the Belgian yeast. To me, there is a rubber tire character to the flavors that I’ve noted in each one of these beers I’ve had. Farmhouse Hatter’s hop levels seem lower than the normal recipe, though, so this character was minimized in this beer and I liked it a lot more because of it. The Belgian Saison character is evident in the early part of the sip with some grassy, somewhat sour (but think of a fruity sourness or mild tartness rather than a true sour beer) overtone with the hops coming in on the tail end of the sip. The hops in this case were floral rather than piney, West Coast style hops. There was a nice dry, bitter finish, but the beer had good balance and was a pleasure to drink (although one was plenty for me).

San Diego Beers: Green Flash & Stone

As luck would have it, I got to spend a couple of days in San Diego over a weekend recently. Like the majority of my traveling, I got to see an airport and a hotel and that’s about it, but this time as I was out taking a couple of sunset photos I noticed that the marina next door to my hotel had a little liquor store in it. The downside was marina prices, but the upside was I walked out of there with a 6-pack of Green Flash Brewing Co’s West Coast India Pale Ale and a bomber of Stone’s Arrogant Bastard.

I know, “Gee, Liquid Diet, you went to the West Coast and had a couple of IPA’s…” Not the most imaginative selections, but I knew I was getting a good beer with the Stone and I have never had Green Flash and that’s definitely not something sold in KS/MO. The fact of the matter is that West Coast brewers are hop-obsessed, so while drinking a couple IPA’s in San Diego is no stretch, where better to do so?!

The West Coast IPA was an interesting beer. It poured a tea color with some red highlights and with plenty of crud from the bottle conditioning floating around in it. Nice, shaving cream-like head. The aroma was really mild on my first bottle, and much to my surprise, it tasted really mild for a West Coast IPA. Generally, IPA’s from California and Oregon are 100% hops and they smash you in the face with hoppy character, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t write in my tasting notes, “English style IPA?”

It was very balanced with a strong malt backbone. The hops were earthy and very floral, but lacked the grapefruity or resiny characteristics so common to West Coast beers of this style. I was floored at how mild this was. I looked up some reviews on BeerAdvocate and they all had basically the opposite to say. Interesting…

I ordered some food room service and my entree was sea scallops wrapped in prosciutto with a spicy hot chorizo-chipotle potato salad (excellent food, by the way!). Interestingly, the hop character of the Green Flash beer went into serious overdrive with the spice. Gone was the neutral, gentlemanly “English style” balanced IPA I first detected, replaced by a straight up West Coast thug hell bent on trashing my taste buds with hops! The differences were night and day and if I didn’t know better, I would have thought these were two different beers altogether.

After two bottles of West Coast IPA (around 7.5% ABV, and I haven’t been drinking much, so I was feeling it), I switched to the bomber. I’ve had Stone Arrogant Bastard before and I enjoy it. It has about the same alcohol content as the Green Flash, so after another 22oz I think I fell asleep for a while! lol Usually very hoppy beers will attenuate the palate and the hops character dies down a little, but the more I drank the hoppier these beers got. My brain fatigued long before my palate!

Lagunitas Little Sumpin’ Extra! Ale

Yes, boys and girls, another Lagunitas beer! In the summertime, Lagunitas offers a seasonal wheat beer called Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’. In September 2009, they released the beer I’m drinking, Little Sumpin’ Extra! which is, presumably, an imperial version of the normal Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’.

Since this beer was released last September, that makes it about a year old. I’m not sure when I bought it or where, but my guess is I probably picked it up at Lukas in Overland Park. The beer comes in a 22oz bomber and the stats are right on the label: 72.51 IBU and 8.74%ABV. That means it has a lot of hops (big surprise) and a lot of alcohol to you unscientific types!

I have not had the original Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ beer this one is based on, but the original is made with 50% wheat in the malt bill, making it a wheat beer. Knowing Lagunitas the way I do, though, if you’re thinking “Boulevard Wheat” then that is likely a big mistake. Lagunitas are completely hops obsessed and their trademark brewing style is cramming as much hops into their beers as humanly possible, so I’m guessing their version of a “wheat beer” is still more of an IPA than most in the midwest may be used to.

The beer pours a nice orange color with a creamy, full head of off-white, densely packed bubbles. higher hopped and higher alcohol beers tend to be hard on head retention, and this is no different. It disappears quickly. There is some cloudiness to the beer, but it looks more to be from bottle-conditioning than from the wheat. True to Lagunitas, the aroma is hoppy, but still mellow. Keep in mind that hoppy beers are best drunk fresh, and with age, hop character will decrease in a beer. That said, the Little Sumpin’ Extra has a nice aroma of hops with a really tropical undertone to me (pineapple, soft fruit), rather than the grapefruit and citrus I often pick up from their beers. The aroma seems sweet to me, too, so there must be some malt in there too.

Of course, the flavor of the beer is hops-dominated, but it isn’t quite as over the top as some of Lagunitas’s offerings can be. At this age, though, it’s tough to know if that is by design or age. If someone handed you this beer and asked you to sip, and then said, “That’s from Lagunitas” your first reaction would not be, “Really, that’s SO different for them…” This is a Lagunitas beer through and through. If you don’t know what that means, pick up a mixed six pack of different labels from them and you’ll see that their beers are all of the same vein, not that it’s a bad thing.

The hop flavor is still of soft, tropical fruit. It’s hard to explain, but it’s not the citrus flavors of hops coming through, or the piney-resiny-earthy variety. The hop character is similar to what I remember Sierra Nevada’s Torpedo to be like, which has a lot of pineapple character, although I’m not picking that up specifically in this beer. Part of it is that while there are a lot of hops in this beer (72.51IBU!), the hops are tempered by a lot of malt. The hops ride in on a sweet wave of malt, which really mellows them out and softens them. I can taste a bit of alcohol in the second part of the sip, which ramps up the hop bitterness, but again, to use the wave analogy, it peaks quickly and then breaks on the shore and mellows.

For as sweet a beer as this tastes, it finishes pretty dry and there is a long, lingering bitterness in the back of my tongue and throat that is pleasant. This is a pleasurable beer and I wonder how much of the sweeter/mellower character comes from the wheat, too? From a practical point of view, I would classify this as an IPA or double IPA to someone who wanted to know the style, and it’s 100% West Coast hops-obsessed brewing that created it, but for a Lagunitas beer there is a glimmer of sumpin’ a little different that separates it from the rest of the pack.

A Couple of Beers Revisited

I have been an extremely lazy blogger, but quite frankly, I also haven’t been drinking much beer over the last few months. You’d think, “OK, it’s summer, the guy will actually drink some beer” but I haven’t been drinking much to start with, and what I have been drinking seems to mostly be rum for some reason. In any case, I am still working through some old stuff in my “cellar” and wanted to revisit a couple beers that I’ve had the past two days.

The first is Big Sky Brewing’s limited release stout, Slow Elk, which I originally reviewed here. That review was from December 2009, so the beer has some age now. This time around, comparing my previous tasting notes, I am still getting an astringency, way, WAY back in the aftertaste (like if I wait a minute or so between sips). I think the oatmeal “slickness” is a little more evident, giving it a more pleasant body than I previously thought and while no chocolate or coffee notes really appeared out of thin air, the roasty flavors are still nice. I think this would actually be a good complement to some lighter fare that you don’t generally pair with a stout, maybe even like a blackened fish or chicken dish. I think I get a little cherry in the flavor, too, which could be a component of some oxidation in the beer, which isn’t always a bad thing especially on dark beers. So, for the Slow Elk, I think some age definitely did it some good.

The beer I had yesterday was the Breckenridge 471 double IPA, which I reviewed originally here, and then revisited once here. Well, I’m back again! I’m not exactly sure how old this beer is now, other than these bottles were given to me in March 2010. The beer still has all the alcohol, of course, still pretty well-hidden (flavor-wise. Buzz-wise, it’s about as subtle as dropping a sack of bricks on your foot). The hops have diminished a bit, but I’ll bet I could appreciate this effect a LOT more if I had a fresh bottle to do a side-by-side comparison tasting with. The hops seemed to take on a little bit of a cat-pee aroma and flavor, which isn’t all that unusual for hops, actually, as bad as it sounds! It was still plenty good to drink, but, no big surprise for a highly-hopped beer, this one is better fresher.

So, there you have it, by coincidence we have one beer that seems better with age and one that doesn’t. As a general rule of thumb, IPA’s and other high hopped beers are best drunk fresh while darker beers, in GENERAL, tend to age more gracefully. Certainly true in this case.

Quick Taste: New Belgium Ranger IPA

This isn’t an in-depth review of New Belgium’s Ranger IPA as I was drinking it in a big group of people in a social setting, so my attention was more toward my guests than the beer. But, since this is the first new beer I’ve drank in months, it seemed like a good idea to at least give a first impression. I had it on tap at Old Chicago in Overland Park about three weeks ago.

My first impression of Ranger was that it was on the watery side for mouthfeel and also wasn’t as hoppy as I thought it would be. The 7% ABV was well-hidden. The hops seemed more for bittering and were resiny and earthy rather than aromatic, but that could’ve been because my attention wasn’t on the beer. Overall impression was that it wasn’t that great of an IPA, but I will make an effort to revisit it this summer when I have a chance to spend more time with the beer and less with socializing so I can give it a fair shake. Based on my initial tasting, though, there are a lot of other New Belgium beers I would have before Ranger, and certainly a lot more IPA’s I would enjoy before this, but I need to give it a fair shake before I judge too quickly.

A Field Trip to The Toronado

The Toronado is probably one of the most famous bars in the country. I heard about it through listening to Craft Beer Radio, and it has probably been made most famous by its annual barley wine event. I was in San Francisco for a work weekend a few weeks ago and on my day of touring San Franciso, the Toronado was the grand finale. By some miracle I made it back to San Jose, 60 miles outside of SF!

The Toronado is, by all standards, a dive bar. It is in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, so expect to see lots of colorful people and an interesting atmosphere. It’s too bad they don’t have street seating out on the sidewalk because I can think of fewer places that would be as much fun to have a few drinks and watch people.

The bar is dark, the service is non-existant, they don’t serve food and it’s a ton of fun! When I was there, the place just kept getting busier and busier, and they had one bartender and no servers. So, 150 or so people all had to crowd the bar to shout drink orders to the guy. The music was good, with a mix of Iron Maiden, Guns n’ Roses and other classic bands. The people were friendly, and it was probably the most laid-back dive bar I’ve been to. They don’t serve any food, so people either bought their own with them or ordered sandwiches from the shop next door and brought them in.

Now, let’s talk about the beer. The Toronado has some good taps, and things we’d never see here in KC, but it didn’t blow me out of the water completely. They did seem to be having a happy hour, though (I was there for a few hours, and the whole time I was there my beers were $1 off), which was VERY cool for a Saturday. Try finding that anywhere!

I started off with, what else, Pliny the Elder, the world famous double IPA brewed by Russian River Brewing Company. This beer weighs in at 8%ABV, but it felt stronger than that to me. A full pint was, get this, $4. The hops were piney and resiny, West Coast style, but without some of the grapefruity and floral notes I also like in IPA’s. I got tired of it about halfway into the glass, and was a little disappointed I had wasted so much sobriety on what to me was a run of the mill double IPA that you can find 20 more like at any bottle shop in town. Maybe I’m a heretic!

I decided to change up my tactics a lot on my next round, heading straight for the cask ale side of the menu. The Toronado had about 4-6 cask ales on hand pumps while I was there. I can’t honestly say I have ever had a cask conditioned beer before this, so I was really excited. I went with a brewery I’d never heard of, and a beer I’d never heard of, Twist of Fate by Moonlight Brewing Company. After screaming to the bartender several times, I learned that Twist of Fate is an English style “bitter,” basically an amber ale meant as a session beer, more or less. He warned me, “It’s served warm, at room temperature.” Perfect! My kind of place! Moonlight was started in 1992 and only makes about 1000 barrels of beer per year, almost all of which are kegged/casked and sold off Bay Area taps. I was really happy to be drinking something so local!

The beer was served as promised, and cost me a whopping $3. Yes, $3 for a pint of artisanal, local, cask beer. Crazy, huh? It was perfect at that temperature. Had a bit of a bite to it, sort of sour, but not like an acetic acid sour. It definitely wasn’t a “sour beer” by any stretch, but it had that type of bite, with a nice malt and hops balance. At 5.6%ABV it was a little strong for a session beer, but it was smooth and delicious and one of the best beers I’ve ever had. With a menu full of awesome beers in front of me, I liked it enough to have a second one!

I was buzzing pretty good by now and I probably should have gone next door to eat something, but I literally had the best seat in the house, so I didn’t want to give up my perch. Throwing caution to the wind, I decided to have Lost Abbey’s Serpent’s Stout. LIke Russian River, Lost Abbey is a famous California brewery and it was a treat to sample their beer. This one was served in a tulip glass, also at a very appropriate temperature for an imperial stout (which for me, is around room temperature, again). I think this one was a measly $4, too!

At 10.5%ABV, this ended up being a big mistake. I honestly can’t tell you much about the beer other than it was good. I was flying pretty high by now and adding a big beer to it all didn’t help, plus I was engaged fully in conversation with my new friends I met at the bar and wasn’t really taking tasting notes. I read some complaints that this beer can be “hot” meaning sharp with the alcohol, and I didn’t notice that, possibly because I was two sheets to the wind by this time.

Not wanting to call it quits just yet, I finished my afternoon drinking session with another Moonlight offering on cask, their IPA called Bombay by Boat. At 5.9% this just added insult to injury and, again, I have no brilliant tasting notes to offer, but it had a nice bitterness, some balance from the malt, and was really smooth and easy to drink being on cask. It cost $3. I could have stayed all night!

Somehow, I managed to leave the Toronado, catch a bus back downtown, walk to the Caltrain station and get back to San Jose! Amazing!

The Toronado was a lot of fun and I highly recommend it to anybody who is visiting San Francisco. Bring some food and plan on staying for a while. My original intent was to go a mile west of the Toronado to the actual Haight-Ashbury intersection and eat dinner at the Magnolia, which is supposed to serve excellent beer and food, but I was pretty much stumbling out of the place and just getting back to where I needed to be seemed like the best idea of all. The best dive bar in the world, except for the Cigar Box, that is!

Breckenridge 471 IPA Revisited + A Trip to San Francisco

This is perhaps a first for this blog… revisiting a beer previously reviewed! A friend of mine recently gave me a six-pack of the Breckenridge 471 IPA (really a double IPA, at 9.2% ABV!) and I was curious what I thought of it before. It wasn’t as hoppy as it seemed to me the last time I had it, so I wanted to give a new set of impressions. Read my previous review for more of the basic background info on this beer.

The aroma is crazy. The first blast I got right after pouring was of tangerine. Grapefruit is really dominant, but this time I was catching a lot of tangerine aroma, too. Flavor is all grapefruit. Good lord! It’s like a glass of grapefruit juice! Not that hoppy?! What was I thinking when I reviewed this beer initially! It’s a definite hop bomb.

To me, 471 is a “calibration beer.” What I mean by this is it’s a great beer to learn what a specific flavor tastes like in beer. For example, I never REALLY understood what “toffee” tasted like in a beer until I had Ommegang Abbey Ale, then it was like being hit over the head with a hammer… a hammer made from toffee! Another example for me is the coriander flavor of Blue Moon. Not the greatest beer, not the worst, but if you wonder what coriander in beer tastes like, Blue Moon will “calibrate” your taste buds/brain and you’ll know.

For me, 471 is a good calibration beer for hops, just in case you are really new to beer and don’t know what hops taste like! Specifically the bright, citrus-y and especially grapefruit-like hop profiles come through really strongly on this beer.

It’s a great beer, very bitter, which I love, and now that I think of it, one of my favorite double IPA’s because it isn’t offset by so much obvious malt. My biggest complaint of double IPA’s is that they tend to be really sweet, and not as hoppy as some regular IPA’s to me. What I love about 471 is that it lacks some of the balance that other DIPA’s have, not being weighed down by cloying sweetness and really just letting the hops rip full blast. Yum!

In totally unrelated news, I am traveling to San Francisco for a couple days this weekend and will have an opportunity to get some beer in. I won’t have a car, which is a disappointment, and I plan on doing the usual tourist stuff and really walking and getting some photos in, but I also have a stop planned at the world-famous Toronado and food + beer planned down the street a ways at the Magnolia or Alembic (or, hell, maybe both!). I want to try to get most of my beer-related goals met on Friday, then spend more of Saturday doing other things, but I’m really looking forward to the trip. Will have things to write about afterward, so stay tuned!