Two of us Brew Dogs took a ride up to Northampton, Massachusetts this weekend on a musical endeavor. Riding in the back seat of a hatchback with a bunch of equipment is not the most comfortable way to spend a weekend evening, let me tell you. Though I didn’t have to share a cramped seat-and-a-half with a drummer this time around, that hard bench seat and long drive after a long day at work really did a number on my lumbar and my spirits. There’s nothing that soothes both better than some face-time with my two favorite flowers, the second of which is Hops.
Our arrival coincided with a show being held at The Montague Bookmill, which is up a flight of stairs from The Lady Killgrew Cafe, where we had heard they pulled some nice pints. We were super psyched to see this Imperial IPA from Southern Tier on a small but impressive tap list and both ordered one to take up to the show. Southern Tier brews some seriously huge beers and this one is no exception. It poured rust red and rather thick into the huge snifters it was being served in and it had a nice and light half-inch head. You could smell it before you even got it near your face and once you had your nose in the bowl it was enough to make your eyes water. Fruit, hops, and alcohol all came on strong, and the insane hop additions really came through in the flavor as well. It’s certainly robust and really highlights how these modern hop bomb beers are not just one note brews but can really bring a lot of complexity to the table with their intricately structured hop profiles. There was fruity citrus and resinous pine as well as a nice balance between the hops’ bitterness and subtle spice. The malt backed things up nicely and helped keep the 11% ABV from being too overt.
We always have great beer when we come up here (looking forward to grabbing a few People’s Pint bombers tomorrow) and it was nice to see one of my favorite New York brewer’s beers on tap. It was also so effective in making me forget the pain being seated for hours had caused me that I proceeded to sit through the entire show while drinking it.
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I finally drank another one of these on Tuesday night. I did enjoy the hop bonanza that is the unearthly but I think at the end of the day I actually might prefer it’s little brother the Phin and Matt’s Extraordinary Ale. While it doesn’t have quite the complexity of the Unearthy (while both are boiled with Cascade, sent through a hop back of Styrian Golding and then dry hopped with Cascades, the Unearthly is bolstered with Chinooks in the kettle and dry hopped with Chinooks, Centenials as well as the aforementioned Cascades) it packs a ton of piney and resiny hop character into an incredibly light bodied, low IBu, low alchohol brew. Serious hop character, not the sort of apologetic hop character that you use to describe an English IPA.
I guess I’ve just drank so many syrupy Double IPAs that its more exciting for me now to watch brewers start to really get good at getting big hops out of small beers, like Phin and Matt’s Extraordinary Ale and Two Brother’s Bitter End Pale Ale.
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