Hop Wallop - Victory Brewing Company

So, this beer has the tough task of living up to the Dreadnaught from Three Floyds Brewing...NOT an easy task...let's see how it stacks up.

Vitals:

Name: Hop Wallop

Style: American IIPA

IBU: ??

ABV: 8.5%

Gravity: ??

Purchased at: Trixie's Liquor

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a golden copper color; 1.5 fingers of bone-white head. Decent/moderate retention and a nice cap. No noticeable carbonation from the look of it.

Smell: I barely smell any malt; mostly floral and piney hops and maybe some citrus hops as well. Smells uber hoppy, which is exciting.

Taste: Hop-forward doesn't even begin to describe this beer. The hops wash over your entire mouth and it feels like your tongue is being attacked. Mostly piney resinous flavors here. This beer has virtually no balance, which is OK for an extreme hop head like me but will punish anyone other than that.

Mouthfeel: Oily and resinous; medium body and not any carbonation. Attacks your taste buds and sticks with you long after you finish the drink. This beer completely coats your mouth.

Overall Grade: B

Comments: Does it help that this beer followed up my A+ Dreadnaught review? No. But in all honesty I feel this is a valid rating for this beer. I like this beer, but it's simply too imbalanced to warrant a higher grade. If you're not a huge hop head you will most likely hate this beer. Experiment with this brew accordingly.

Cheers,

Hurls

Delirium Tremens - Brouwerji Huyghe

I will go ahead and lead off this post that I love love LOVE getting recommendations from people - if you have beer that you enjoy, please give me a heads up by commenting on here, emailing, texting, facebook, etc. However, I am also very wary of things being pumped up too much and not being able to live up to expectations. So, when my best friend Pat F. gave me a heads up to this beer I was very grateful and went out to pick some up. I believe it only comes in this huge liter (I think?) bottle, so be wary. However, when I went to pick some up I asked the guy at the store what he thought of this and he told me that right now (not sure based on what ranking or system) it is considered to be the "Best Beer in the WORLD." Okay, so I am slightly skeptical, but very curious...here goes nothing on seeing if I agree with whomever made that assessment...

Vitals:

Name: Delirium Tremens

Style: Belgian Strong Pale Ale

IBU: ??

ABV: 8.5%

Gravity: ??

Purchased at: Trixie's Liquor

Descriptions:

Appearance: So I don't normally comment on the bottles that the beer comes in, but this one is pretty interesting. It has pink elephants and dragons and crap all over it - it looks like whoever designed this was on drugs or something. Anywho...pours a golden yellow with a TON of head on the beer. I had to make 3-4 separate efforts to get the pour because of too much of the bone-white head. The head itself is very light, but had fantastic retention. There are tons of carbonation bubbles rocketing through this brew; the pour had an odd haziness to it, which made me a bit concerned that it might have an infection. Guess we'll find out...

Smell: You get a LOT in the smell of this beer: from fruity to floral, herbal to spiced. You get some cinnamon I think. I think you get some melon and banana, maybe apricot, and some wheat or yeast smell coming through. I suspect the spices to be cinnamon and coriander. I will be perfectly blunt: this smells like a great (and complex) tasting beer, and it was very difficult for me to identify a lot of these smells because there is so much going out. Having said that, all of the smells come together quite nicely.

Taste: You get a little hop bitterness coming through along with banana, coriander, and apricot. It's a pretty spicy beer and you get a quick taste of alcohol on the bite. Yeast and breadiness sort of dominates a little bit too much for me, but it's not a big detractor. You even seem to get a small taste of apple in the beer. I'm not going to lie, this is an extremely great, but complex taste to judge and I'm having a hard time with it. This was definitely my hardest beer I have reviewed to this point in terms of judging what I'm tasting; definitely not 100% confident in my notes on this.

Mouthfeel: Very light (unexpected) and carbonated (expected); great mouthfeel for the most part but leaves you a bit dried out. The best word for this beer is CRISP, and it's quite dangerous because it's so light that it's 8.5% ABV drinks basically like something that's a 5.5% ABV.

Overall Grade: A-

Comments: Great beer despite my judging difficulties...I do hate that you have to commit to a whole liter of the beer instead of individual 12oz bottles...you kinda have to commit to the whole liter in one sitting....wait...that's not a bad thing :-) Definitely try this out if you like a nice strong belgian ale. It's not overwhelmingly hoppy and the taste is just so unique and complex, you really should check it out!

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

Lilja's Hop Nest Monster - Pangaea Brewing Company

I love the name of this beer - hoping that the taste will be the same. I've never in my life heard of Pangaea Brewing Company, but it must be a Wisconsin brew since I got it from the Old Fashioned BYO 6-pack

Vitals:

Name: Lilja's Hop Nest Monster

Style: American IPA

IBU: 77

ABV: 7.0%

Gravity: 17 deg. Plato

Purchased at: The Old Fashioned (BYO 6-Pack)

Descriptions:

Appearance: The beer pours a dirty straw color, lighter than I would expect from an IPA. The head on this beer is bone-white and reminds me on a meringue topping on a pie. This may be the most unfiltered beer I've ever seen or else it might be infected (yeast problem...insert jokes here)

Smell: Slightly floral smell with mostly grassy hops and toasted malts; maybe a bit grainy. The smell was not what I expected, much less strong than a normal IPA.

Taste: WOW! Full on frontal assault with the grassy hops, this beer certainly lives up to its name in that respect. The bitterness lingers for a long time, though I must say there's not much actual hop flavor, just the bitterness, which is a detractor since you get no complexity. The beer isn't very balanced at all, which is surprising given the grainy malt smell. Lemon and flowers come through a bit as the beer builds to the hop bitterness; you only get a small taste of the toasted malts (thus the imbalance).

Mouthfeel: This beer is medium bodied, but extremely oily and astringent. The beer really dries your mouth out AS you're drinking it, while most astringent beers I've had do that after you finish your sip. I really wonder if this beer is filtered AT ALL - there is a TON of debris that is suspended in the beer.

Overall Grade: B-

Comments: I LOVE LOVE LOVE hops, but this beer just had no balance and wasn't doing it for me. I would drink this every once in a while to see if there's any degree of consistency to this beer, especially to see if the debris thing remains a problem. There are definitely better IPAs out there, go and find one!

Cheers,

Hurls

Scurvy - Tyranena Brewing Company

First of all I'd just like to say that I love the name of this beer - SCURVYYYYYY. If the newest Pirates of the Caribbean didn't suck ass so badly I would make a POTC reference here, but alas...'tis not to be.

However, to lay a little history on you, the real reason that people first started adding hops to beer is because hop resin acts a very powerful preservative for beer. This was extremely helpful in trying to transport beer on long sea voyages, because otherwise it would spoil. From this usage sprung the Imperial Pale Ale (IPA), which is typically loaded with hops. So, hopefully now you have a bit better of an appreciation for the Scurvy beer name, quite fitting if you ask me.

Vitals:

Name: Scurvy

Style: American IPA

IBU: ??

ABV: 7.5%

Gravity: ??

Purchased at: The Old Fashioned (BYO 6-Pack)

Descriptions:

Appearance: Pours a deep amber color, very pretty looking with an off-white, almost tan head on it (about 1.5 fingers worth). The lace retention is very good on this beer - spotty in places with thin strips of thick lace in others.

Smell: The aroma you get is mostly floral with a little citrus mixed in there. Smells good but nothing sticks out incredibly to me.

Taste: First tastes give you a blast of orange and lemon, and a bitter finish with some caramel malt sandwiched in between. Does a so-so job at hiding it's 7.5% ABV.

Mouthfeel: This beer drinks relatively light for being an IPA, but definitely leaves you with the resinous/sticky hop feeling coating your mouth (not a bad thing IMHO). There is some carbonation but not enough to detract from the beer.

Overall Grade: B

Comments: This is a pretty solid IPA, nothing more, nothing less. I would recommend that any hop-head try this beer because it is a good showing from Tyranena, but I wouldn't drink this more than every once in a while simply because I believe there are much better options. Go out to the Old Fashioned, get a Beer Tour of Wisconsin card and give this one a try once you'd have a beer or two - you won't regret it, but I wouldn't lead off with it either...

Cheers,

Hurls

Double Dog Double Pale Ale - Flying Dog Brewery

I can't believe I lived in Northern Virginia for so long and never ventured up to Frederick, MD (well...it IS Maryland...one never really WANTS to go there) to visit the Flying Dog brewery. I think that this is a brewery that I will do a lot of reviewing for in the future.

I will make a quick note about the situation that led to me purchasing this beer. Sarah and I typically buy our alcohol from the Liquor Baron right up East Washington, which is conveniently located about a mile away. Bottle Stop Liquors, which is where this beer was purchased, is probably .9 miles from here. I would rather CRAWL the extra tenth of a mile to get to the sweet sweet Baron than to go into Bottle Stop. The place is filthy, has weird people hanging out next to it, and has people working there who are not the friendliest bunch. At any rate, I have now established my preference. Problem was, the Liquor Baron was changing management or something and we were forced to go to Bottle Stop. There was some ghetto little sign at the cash register that for the bargain price of $199.99 you could obtain a bottle of wine from Charles Woodson's (Packers CB) vineyard. I inquired about it (not to buy) and the manager said that a case was "accidentally dropped off there." Something tells me there was nothing accidental about it - it seems like a Sopranos break-your-knees type deal that went down so I paid and go the hell out of there. The Baron is back open by now, thank God. Honestly, never go to Bottle Stop Liquors. Awful.

Anyways, now for what you really came here to read...

Vitals:

Name: Double Dog Double Pale Ale

Style: American Double Pale Ale / Imperial Ale

IBU: 85

ABV: 11.5%

Gravity: 24 Plato

Purchased at: Bottle Stop Liquors (4 pack)

Descriptions:

Appearance: This pours a pretty dark brown - you could almost mistake it for a brown ale if you didn't smell or taste it. As you can see in the picture the head on this beer was bursting out of my mug, probably about 3 fingers or so in total. This quickly receded but left a very heavy lace on the glass that was left up the whole side as I drank the beer. Very sticky/resinous.

Smell: Smelling this beer seemed to be quite distinct in three places for me. It started off with a very floral aroma, then moved to citrus briefly, and then the piney hops smell to finish it off. This beer smells great to a hophead like me.

Taste: OK, so before I tell you what this beer tastes like, I will say that the main hop variant that is used in this beer is Warrior Hops...enough said. This beer is completely overpowering in every sense of the word. It is more malty than a lot of other PA's I've had recently, and you can taste a little bit of sweet caramel in there, but man, these hops absolutely beat you over the head. Definitely one of the hoppiest beers I've ever had. Some orange and lemon come through but mostly you get grapefruit in this one. You get a long aftertaste as well. The hops are somewhat spicy, or that may just be the warmth of the beer as it builds, but you get some of the piney hop flavor that the aromas promise. It doesn't hide the high ABV, but I don't think it's a detractor with a beer that you know will be this powerful. This beer is WAY bitter and I love it!

Mouthfeel: This definitely leaves a sticky resin coating your mouth after the beer goes down. The mouthfeel is a little on the thicker side for me, which is predictable given its 24 deg. Plato gravity rating. However, it ends up being a smooth drink and builds up some warmth as it goes down, not quite a burn though.

Overall Grade: A-

Comments: I think the best way to describe drinking this beer is that it assaults you. This beer is certainly not for the faint of heart. If you can handle a big beer, big bitterness, and big hoppiness then try this thing out for sure. If not, you probably won't enjoy it, but hey...at least you'll only need a few to get to feeling good with that 11.5% ABV that it boasts. Flying Dog really hit a home run with this beer - I just wish it had a lower ABV so I could have more than a few at a time! Try this out if you're a hophead!!

Cheers,

Hurls