Moon Man - New Glarus

Vitals:

Name: Moon Man

Style: American Pale Ale

IBU: ??

ABV: 5%

Gravity: ??

Purchased at: New Glarus Brewery

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a brilliant, clear gold with 1.5 fingers of bone-white head. Good retention and a nice cap; GREAT lacing on this beer, which is much appreciated. Lots of carbonation bubbles racing up through this beer.

Smell: Fruits. I'm getting big grapefruit and some orange, maybe some pineapple as well. Lots of citrus and some piney hops as well. This smells absolutely delicious to me; there is a pretty sweet smell to it, but it's not sugary.

Taste: Starts with just enough pale malts to start off with some sweetness. You get some juicy qualities up front with the grapefruit/pineapple and the pine hops cascade towards the back of your tongue (it really is a rolling sensation...pretty neat). You get a nice dry finish comprised of citrus hops and citrus rinds from maybe lemons/oranges? Grapefruit briefly strikes again to close it out.

Mouthfeel: Slightly on the light side of medium with a good amount of carbonation in there. This is a VERY drinkable beer and doesn't coat your mouth and/or stick on your palate forever.

Overall Grade: A

Comments: This is an amazing beer; it is one of my favorites and is probably the best session beer that I have ever had (apologies to Gumballhead, as it is 5.5% ABV). This is a MUST try if you like American pale ales or American pale wheat ales. Check it out locally in Wisconsin or head out to the New Glarus brewery for an even fresher look at this one! Dan Carey (Brewmaster at New Glarus) is my hero for creating this gem of a brew.

Cheers,

Hurls

Alpha King - Three Floyds Brewing

Vitals:

Name: Alpha King

Style: American Pale Ale

IBU: 66

ABV: 6.5%

Gravity: ??

Purchased at: Trixie's Liquor

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a cloudy copper color with lots of tiny carbonation bubbles zooming through it. Half a finger of head that is off-white or even tannish. OK retention but a weak lacing (which was surprising) and a spare cap.

Smell: Smells like it will be very well-balanced...lots of maltiness and breadiness to it, but there is an equal backing of piney-hop presence on the nose. However, this is an extremely pleasant nose, as the sweetness mellows out the big piney hop notes.

Taste: This brew is malty from beginning to end, with other tastes highlighting at different points. Seems mostly like caramel and citrus fruit flavors lacing the beginning, but it actually evolves into a more citrus/piney hop finish. This is a very well-crafted and well-balanced beer; you get a bitter finish for sure, so if that's not your thing then you may not enjoy this one!

Mouthfeel: This brew is a bit creamier and heavier than I expected...it actually drinks more like an IIPA or IPA than an APA. This beer has a lot of nice aspects, though...it's oily (in a good way) so it coats your mouth a bit and is well carbonated (which most Three Floyds brews are).

Overall Grade: B+

Comments: This almost seems like it's improperly classified in a few ways. First, it drinks like an IIPA, not an APA. Second, the ABV is more similar to an IPA than an APA. This is a very good beer; having said that, I would probably take Hopalicious from Ale Asylum over this one, but that's only because I feel like this one is a bit maltier and I prefer my beer to be more on the hoppy end than malty. This is a very solid heavy APA; definitely not something you'll be drinking all night long, though!

Cheers,

Hurls

Hop Mountain - Old Dominion Brewing Company

Vitals:

Name: Hop Mountain

Style: American Pale Ale

IBU: ??

ABV: 5.6%

Gravity: ??

Purchased at: Harris Teeter in Herndon, VA

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a deep ruby color with a finger of tan head, which quickly disappears. Great lacing and a very thin cap are left in its wake. The beer is translucent, but with no noticeable carbonation.

Smell: Floral and piney hops all the way with dark malts hanging out in the background. The malts definitely seem to be much darker, roasted, caramelized, etc. than typical pale ale malts. The beer smells good but it's nothing incredibly special or anything.

Taste: This is an interesting drink...starts sweet with the malts and then rolls into a muted piney hop taste, then into sweetness again. The second layer of sweetness is mostly citrus in nature, orange/grapefruit/pineapple/apple/etc. This is a very nice complexity they have going on here, but it's disappointing that you get only mostly hop bitterness and not quite as much hop flavor. I guess maybe the citrus hops flavor that would be near the end gets washed out by all of the other complex citrusy goodness they have going on there.

Mouthfeel: Light side of medium bodied with a moderate level of carbonation. This beer has an oily feel to it and it coats every square inch of your palate. Decent overall mouthfeel; again, nothing special there.

Overall Grade: B

Comments: A slightly above average beer, but pretty good by Northern VA craft standards. Definitely worth a try but missing that hop flavor sucks a bit; I considered giving it a B- because of that, but it's such an interesting drink and a very complex beer, so that won those lost points back.

Cheers,

Hurls

Hazed and Infused - Boulder Beer Company

Vitals:

Name: Hazed and Infused

Style: American Pale Ale (dry-hopped)

IBU: ??

ABV: 4.85%

Gravity: 12.5 Plato

Purchased at: Trixie's Liquor

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a hazy/translucent amber/brown in color, which is darker than I expected it to be. You get about 1.5 fingers of foamy head, which is off-white in color. Decent retention, but the lacing is great on this beer. You get a respectable cap after the head is gone, but nothing extremely memorable.

Smell: Piney hops pair with citrusy fruits here (grapefruit, to venture a guess). There is some sweet maltiness in the background, giving it the smell of a very balanced beer. 

Taste: Okay, so to give a quick preface to this taste review I want to give an idea of what dry-hopped, as this beer is strongly advertised to be, actually is. So typically when you get your wort (the concoction that has a lot of sugars from the grains and adjuncts that the yeast will consume to produce alcohol) you also do a hop boil usually. Boiling the hops for longer periods of time will cause more alpha acids and hop oils to be released into the beer. This will result in the bitterness that you get and some of the hoppy taste and flavor. However, hops that are added very LATE in the boil, or after the boil (as they are in dry-hopping), typically are used to add flavor and aroma without the bitterness of the hop oils.

Having gotten THAT out of the way, you get a mostly sweet, almost caramel, malt flavor up front. The hops are VERY muted in this beer and borderline on being completely weak. You get some citrus and piney hops toward the end of the taste with grapefruit and maybe lemon/orange. This beer is not nearly as balanced as it smells and I prefer my beers to err on the hoppy side rather than the malty side. Oh well, can't win 'em all.

Mouthfeel: Pretty darn thin here on the mouthfeel, this is a VERY light APA. The carbonation is also low, which gives you a good, pleasant drinkability. Based on the ABV and mouthfeel you could drink this beer all day if you felt so inclined.

Overall Grade: C

Comments: This beer is what its grade indicates - very average. This honestly tastes like someone had a malty lager and then dry hopped it slightly to try to pass it off as an APA. Dry hopping, as I said, has a lot to do with the aroma, which explains why it smelled balanced but wasn't at all. This is a very forgettable beer, but it's definitely within the realm of possibilities for being a sessionable beer. Keep looking - you can do better than this.

Cheers,

Hurls

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale - Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

Vitals:

Name: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Style: American Pale Ale

IBU: 37

ABV: 5.6%

Gravity: 13 deg. Plato

Purchased at: Trixie's Liquor

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a translucent amber color with virtually no carbonation bubbles. You get about a finger of foamy white head, which has decent retention and a thin cap. What really strikes me about this beer is the lacing is AMAZING...looks delicious.

Smell: You get slightly more of a malty smell here than a lot of hoppier APAs I've had recently (e.g. Hopalicious). Piney and citrus hops with some orange peel thrown in there as well. You get some lemon smell in there, but not much. This is just a damn good smelling beer.

Taste: Pretty much perfectly balanced. You get citrus flavor and hops up front and then a bitter, piney hop finish. The malts back the beer steadily the whole way through. I can truly say that this is a very rare find...a macro-brew quantity/distribution with close to a craft beer taste. This definitely beats a lot of sub-par-to-mediocre craft APAs I've had, but I still would stick with something like a Hopalicious for my money.

Mouthfeel: Medium body with very light carbonation. This beer is actually very drinkable and doesn't have much astringency to it that some pale ales give you. Overall a pleasant drinkability/mouthfeel experience.

Overall Grade: B+

Comments: This is a very solid beer that I'd pick over plenty of others. I truly do mean what I said about having a pretty solid craft brew taste but having the advantage of being a huge scale macro brew that you can get most anywhere. If you're looking to try out pale ales to see if you'll like the style I would suggest that you absolutely start here!

Cheers,

Hurls

Pride and Joy - Three Floyds Brewing

So, I think it's somewhat rare to find a brewery that will provide you with solid beers with each effort they make. Three Floyds definitely fits into this category. I've already reviewed Gumballhead and Robert the Bruce, and would like to get hold of some more Alpha King so I can throw that one on here as well. For now, this is the first of three successive reviews of Three Floyds Beers. Pride and Joy is a "mild ale" and, not unlike the late great Stevie Ray Vaughn's song (which shares its namesake), I am expecting great things.

Vitals:

Name: Pride and Joy

Style: American Pale Ale

IBU: 30

ABV: 5.0%

Gravity: ??

Purchased at: Riley's Wines of the World

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a brilliant dark orange/copper color; a finger of ever-so-slightly off-white head. Decent retention, with nice lacing and a good cap. Lots lots lots of carbonation bubbles racing up through the beer - looks delicious.

Smell: Citrus hops dominate here and mingle with orange and grapefruit. There is a sweet pale malt smell to it as well, but by far the citrus wins the day on the smell. This beer has a great smell to it IMHO.

Taste: The malt sweetness is fleeting, but delicious nonetheless. This beer is what you'd call "hop forward" meaning the hop flavor and bitter bite rolls over the sweetness earlier in the taste. You get the grapefruit with the citrus hops at the bite but the orange smell seems muted in the taste. You actually end up with a piney hop finish that lingers. Not as balanced as FFF's beers usually are but it is still solid.

Mouthfeel: Light and refreshing; highly carbonated that tickles your tongue as many FFF's beers do. Bit of a dry finish, which is a little more accentuated than usual for the style, but is still good.

Overall Grade: B+

Comments: Very good beer; definitely the best APA I've had as far as being a SESSION beer goes (see my post on Session Beers for more). I'd recommend this to anyone who likes hops; you truly cannot go wrong with any FFF's beer in my experience. Two more FFF's reviews to come in short order!

Cheers,

Hurls

Hopalicious - Ale Asylum

Ah, so many good memories with Hopalicious. Regrettably it has taken me quite a while to review this one, though it is one of my very favorite Wisconsin beers. Cheers to Marc for leaving a few of these as a leftover from the movie night we hosted back in the fall - that really got me turned on to Ale Asylum in general, and Hopalicious specifically. I also distinctly remember loving the fact that Ale Asylum provided fresh cascade hops to go with your beer at Quivey's Grove, which was fantastic. I will be trying to organize a big group for Quivey's this year and it should be even better than last year! Anyways, once Sarah got me a kegerator I knew the first beer that had to go in there...now on to the good stuff...

Vitals:

Name: Hopalicious

Style: American Pale Ale

IBU: ??

ABV: 5.8%

Gravity: ??

Purchased at: where HAVEN'T I bought Hopalicious? Hmm....

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a delicious looking golden orange color, almost to the point of being copper. Medium carbonation is evident from the tons of little bubbles excitedly rising to the top. The head content was less than I anticipated, despite being familiar with the beer, and it wasn't for lack of a good pour. All in all there was maybe slightly less than a finger of bone-white head, which surprisingly lacked retention but left a beautiful thick lacing on the glass.

Smell: Surprisingly, given the name, the smell is somewhat understated (especially compared to a lot of Pales out there). You get floral and citrus hops on the nose and a bit of sweet malt hiding in there. There may be a little fruitiness to it (grapefruit if I had to guess, but I'm not completely confident in that) but not too much.

Taste: This beer is very well balanced - you get sweet malt up front (not too much or too little) and you get the hop bitterness that hop-heads crave on the back-end of the beer. The hops are surprisingly piney with a citrus flavor as well. What's surprising to me here is that Ale Asylum prides themselves on putting in ELEVEN (yes, you read that right, as in ten plus one) separate additions of cascade hops to the boil. I am just becoming familiar with the brewing process, as I'm looking to try it out with Marc, but basically you boil the wort (will explain this in a later post) with hops for a long time (typically an hour, but some beers such as DogFishHead 90 and 120 minute IPAs, appropriately named by the way) boil for longer. The hops immediately added (and thus boiled the longest) are for bittering purposes, so you can get a lot of the bitter resins out of the hop cones. The later additions (boiled less) provide the main aromas and flavors. So, basically, with that long (yet quite abbreviated) explanation the puzzling thing to me is that Cascade hops typically impart citrus and floral tastes and aromas, yet I'm getting a lot of piney flavor here. It makes me wonder what the tight-lipped folks over at Ale Asylum are up to with this beer that they don't advertise. My guess is something like Chinook hops added with 15-20 minutes left in the boil but this is just pure speculation, since Chinook are known for being very piney. The key here is the smoothness of the bitter finish; you really get a sweet taste up front from the malt, then a pretty bitter piney bite, and then a surprisingly smooth bitter finish to bring you through. It glides off your palate rather than getting that scraping feeling that a lot of bitter, hoppy brews can give you.

Mouthfeel: Medium body with decent carbonation. I will say that the body is more on the light side of medium, so you could drink this all day (as I can personally attest to). You get a nice thin layer of residual resin on your palate, which is just right for this type of beer. You don't want your mouth to feel completely coated and overwhelmed, but this beer leaves you at just the right place: wanting to come back for more!

Overall Grade: A-

Comments: I consider this to be a close-to-perfect beer for year-round drinking; its versatility is very nice. I think it's light enough to be able to drink in the summer and give you a hopiness if that's what you crave. However, it's also bold enough of a taste, and not completely light bodied, so you can enjoy it when the weather gets cold. Most people know of my love for Ale Asylum beers (if you have a chance check out my post on Bedlam! and try that one out too). Also, as a teaser, I have a bottle of Ambergeddon (what a great name, by the way) in the fridge, awaiting tasting and review. This beer is available practically everywhere in Madison, on tap or for sale in 6 and 12 packs. If you consider yourself a hop-head, or have any interest in hoppy beers, this is a must-have staple of your beer drinking rotation. Go out and enjoy one and see if you agree with my assessment!

Cheers,

Hurls